15 years after the political uprising in Thailand by the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (also known as the Red Shirts), during which more than 80 demonstrators were killed and 2,000 were injured, the families of deceased victims are still seeking justice. In preparation for a fiction film about the deadly demonstration, filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong brought together eight relatives of those victims for an intimate, facilitated workshop and discussion. The resultant mid-length film, Narrative, is a curious, often cold account of a group of people attempting to make up for injustice through unfamiliar, laborious means.
The film begins with a prayer. A group of four people sit before Buddhist monks, repeating after them in reverent devotion. The theme of repetition will, for lack of a better term, repeat throughout Narrative. Inside a stark, white studio, actor Ornanong Thaisriwong proposes for the participants of Suwichakornpong’s experiment an exercise in empathy. They’ll take turns telling a story with one emotion, which is written down on a card they take from Thaisriwong, and their partner must guess the emotion when they’re finished. This simple premise might carry some emotional weight were it not for the fact that every person telling their story mentions the emotion they’re meant to keep secret.
Meanwhile, beyond the permeable boundary of the set, the film crew adjusts and moves their cameras and boom mics, producers milling about out of sight. Other people, perhaps relatives of the participants, sit on chairs in the back of the room, some knitting, others staring into space. Suwichakornpong herself even sits on the ground in between two participants during a conversation with a human rights lawyer, unseen until we catch her face at the edge of the frame.
These multiple divergences lend Narrative an air of experimentation, but drain it of feeling. It’s essentially a research project, a partial proof of concept, constructed out of strategies both cinematic and therapeutic — but they make it a difficult film to enter emotionally. If one strategy within the 50-minute runtime works, it is the one that takes us momentarily away from the film set and into the real world. Leaning against a balcony railing, a middle-aged participant talks, in extreme close-up, about her family being the sole source of fighting motivation against an impassive legal system. It is one of the few moments in which the film seems to allow us to connect with one of the participants.
The final exercise in the film points to repetition more explicitly. In pairs, the participants tell each other what they’re thankful for and their partners repeat what they say, as if the words they just heard were their own. In theory, the repetition mirrors the prayer from the beginning, and suggests the act of remembrance can serve as a kind of plea for justice. This time, however, the film’s score, until now an intermittent but pleasant drone, becomes discordant and drowns out the participants’ words. We can see their emotions more clearly but hear nothing. In spite of the collective trauma held in their small group, they smile, even laugh, with each other and for each other.
“What tools do we have to hold the state accountable,” says the lawyer after he explains to the participants? It’s up to them to hold an immoble justice system to account for their injustices; perhaps the conversations borne of these staged exercises — mostly just scraps of sound that point our attention less to feeling the affect of their speech than to gleaning its content — and the film constructed out of them can be that tool. That seems to be what Suwichakornpong hopes her upcoming fiction film will do. Given how many atrocities across the world go unpunished despite a surplus of living, cinematic proof, in Narrative that hope reads as merely a naïve gesture.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2026.
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