Anocha Suwichakornpong, Graceland (2006) and Nightfall (2016)
e-flux Video & Film is very pleased to present this month’s staff pick, featuring two shorts by Anocha Suwichakornpong: Graceland (2006) and Nightfall (2016), streaming from Thursday, July 1 through Saturday, July 31, 2021.
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s moving-image works are innovative, challenging, and empowering. They disrupt the dominant point of view, break conventional ways of storytelling, and reflect on the production of film itself in an attempt to open up a new screen space where affective engagement and political reflection come together. e-flux Video & Film team is happy to present two early short films by one of Thailand’s leading filmmakers whose recent feature films have been praised in film festivals all across the world.
Anocha Suwichakornpong, Graceland, 2006
17 minutes
One night in Bangkok, Jon meets a mysterious woman. Together, they embark on a journey to the foreign land — the human heart.
Anocha Suwichakornpong and Tulapop Saenjaroen, Nightfall, 2016
15 minutes
A day in the life of a nameless woman as she wanders around Singapore. Part documentary, part video essay, Nightfall is a fictionalized account of the time Anocha Suwichakornpong spent during a residency researching Thai politics in a foreign land.
Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker and producer. Her work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. By the Time It Gets Dark, Anocha’s second feature, centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces and far-right paramilitaries at Thammasat University in Bangkok. She graduated from the MFA film program at Columbia University. Her thesis film, Graceland, became the first Thai short film to be officially selected by Cannes Film Festival. Mundane History, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. By the Time It Gets Dark premiered in Locarno and has screened in festivals such as Toronto, BFI London, Viennale, and Rotterdam. The film won three Thailand National Film Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. By the Time It Gets Dark was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.
Anocha founded Electric Eel Films, a production house based in Bangkok. She has produced many short films and features, including Wichanon Somumjarn’s In April the Following Year, There Was a Fire, Lee Chatametikool’s Concrete Clouds, and Josh Kim’s How to Win at Checkers (Every Time). In 2014, she was an artist-in-residence at Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore. In 2016, Anocha served on the jury for the Tiger Awards at International Film Festival Rotterdam.
In 2017, Anocha, together with Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Aditya Assarat founded Purin Pictures, an initiative to support Southeast Asian cinema. In 2019, she was named a Prince Claus Laureate. From 2018 to 2020, Anocha was a visiting lecturer at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University. In 2020, Anocha received the Silpathorn Award from the Ministry of Culture, Thailand. Currently, Anocha is a fellow at DAAD artists-in-residence programme in Berlin.
About the series
e-flux Video & Film: staff picks is a monthly streaming series of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.