By the Time It Gets Dark

A filmmaker makes a film about a woman who was involved in the student protests at Bangkok’s Thammasat University in 1976. The protest was brutally suppressed – dozens of demonstrators were killed. The two women get to know one another in a beautiful house in the Thai countryside.
What starts out as a film-within-a-film, intercutting images from Thailand’s past and present, quickly expands into something more complex: a film-about-film in which the associative, poetic power of the medium is investigated and used to the full. This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Anocha Suwichakornpong’s feature debut, Mundane History, which won a Tiger Award in Rotterdam in 2010. The director likes detours and thinks nothing of wandering off on a tangent, possibly never to return. Her dreamy second feature connects the earthly (fungi, commercials) with the spiritual (telekinetic forces, for example) and follows various characters who have changing identities.