Audio transcription

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Suwichakornpong’s new film bravely tackles a subject long taboo for Thai artists and writers: the Thammasat University Massacre of 1976, in which a still-unconfirmed number of protesting students were brutally murdered by the military. Rather than a head-on confrontation with the horrific incident, however, By the Time It Gets Dark takes a more nuanced and digressive path, interweaving the seemingly disconnected stories of a filmmaker researching the massacre together with those of a young pop star and a melancholy maid who drifts enigmatically throughout the film. What unites these different characters, Suwichakornpong seems to suggest, is the still-pulsing trauma of history that has been denied yet not forgotten. In its lyrical interweaving of character narrative and documentary interludes, and in its pixel-imploding ending, By the Time It Gets Dark goes further still by suggesting the limits of the dizzying image world that we increasingly inhabit and the ways in which cinema might give a safe place for local histories and personal memories to be kept alive.