Narrative. 2025. Thailand/Japan/South Korea. Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong. North American premiere. DCP. In Thai; English subtitles. 49 min.
โลคอลเซนเซชันส์ (Local Sensations). 2025. Thailand. Directed by Tulapop Saenjaroen. North American premiere. DCP. In Thai; English subtitles. 25 min.
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s latest shape-shifting excavation of Thai political history examines still-palpable events: the bloody military crackdown that left 90 dead and 2,000 injured during the 2010 pro-democracy protests in Bangkok. On the 15th anniversary of the massacre, the filmmaker invited families of the victims to take part in rehearsal workshops for her forthcoming fiction film about the trial of the perpetrators. For relatives who have yet to see justice in their own lives, the mediated sessions were a space to exchange lived experience, collectively process trauma, and seek legal guidance. Foregrounding its own theatricality and alternating between testimony and staged exchanges, Narrative creates a hybrid cinematic space from which to reflect on the writing of history and imagine pathways to justice.
Questions of commemoration also resonate in Local Sensations, a new work by Tulapop Saenjaroen. Opening with words from “How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine,” by architecture scholar Chatri Prakitnonthakan, the film unfolds as an oblique exploration of monuments and sanctification in Thai society. Through textured black-and-white 16mm cinematography, Saenjaroen encounters nary a statue, instead observing the interplay between beings in space in footage of a glassblowing workshop, an improvised musical happening, a game among architecture students, and a nature center’s animal inhabitants. From this network of gestures, the film invites a “reconsideration of what ‘locality’ and ‘monumentality’ might mean.”