Love and Time: A screening of Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Come Here

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, January 26 at 7pm for Love and Time, featuring a screening of Anocha Suwichakornpong's Come Here (2021, 79 minutes) and a post-screening, in-person conversation with the artist.

“In contemporary Thailand, the notion of love is a complicated one. Love, as an ideology, is inextricably linked to the nation. Societal pressure is such that it is no longer sufficient to have love for yourself, your family and friends, it is the concept of ‘love’ that is used to describe ones dutiful relationship to the nation, religion, and king. […] I wanted the film to explore an anachronistic sense of time, one that is caught between the modern representation of the young protagonists in juxtaposition to the historical underpinnings of their surrounding landscape.” (Anocha Suwichakornpong for The Film Study Center at Harvard University)

In Come Here (2021, 79 minutes), four friends in their mid-twenties go on a trip to Kanchanaburi, a province in western Thailand. They visit the World War II memorial site of the Death Railway, built to honor the tens of thousands of war prisoners who lost their lives there. At night, back at the raft house, they are drinking, smoking weed, and talking randomly. Once in a while, someone would act out a scene from a play—it turns out they are all actors in the same theater company. Running parallel to this narrative is the story of another woman who finds herself alone in the middle of the forest after her friend mysteriously disappears. The four friends in the raft house say something that might allude to that woman, but it is not clear. The woman finds a natural stream. She drinks, washes her face, then goes into the water. Her face begins to transform into another person’s. It’s getting late, all the friends are intoxicated. Some pass out in the bedroom. Only two are left, by themselves. Romance is in the air. Fireworks go off, one after another, high up in the night sky. The others begin to wake up and they all stand still, watching the beautiful fireworks shooting up the sky before disappearing one by one.

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her films have been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto; Cinema Moderne, Montreal; and Olhar De Cinema, Brazil. By the Time It Gets Dark, Anocha’s second feature, premiered at Locarno Film Festival and was presented at festivals worldwide, including Toronto, BFI London, Viennale, and Rotterdam, and went on to win three Thailand National Film Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. In 2017, it was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film. Mundane History, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. Her third feature, Krabi 2562, co-directed with British filmmaker Ben Rivers, premiered at Locarno and is currently touring the festival circuit. She is a co-founder of the Bangkok-bassed production company Electric Eel Films. In 2017, together with Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Aditya Assarat, she founded Purin Pictures, an initiative to support Southeast Asian cinema. Currently, Anocha is a visiting lecturer at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility

–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.

–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.

–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.