Starting out as a bit of meta-commentary on a notorious massacre, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark quickly and deliberately questions its own point of view by filtering it through multiple layers of macro- and micro-fictions, ultimately suggesting the inability of art to truly process experience and trauma. In a strong resemblance to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, planes of existence are layered one on top of the other, and frequent visual allusions to disparate images share the same space…a filmmaker interviewing a survivor of a student protest-turned-atrocity; a series of vignettes set at a tobacco farm; a magic mushroom trip; a cleaning woman at a hotel…elements of all of these stories are revealed to be manufactured, in one way or another intermediary devices through which histories and societies are cataloged.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2017 | Dispatch 2.
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