The delicately poetic second feature by Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong weaves together multiple stories and characters to create a portrait of a beautiful country haunted by the lingering trauma of the 1976 government-sanctioned massacre of student demonstrators in Bangkok.

A shape-shifting narrative around memory, politics and cinema, the film weaves together the stories of several characters. We meet a young waitress serving breakfast at an idyllic country café, only to later find her employed in the busy dining room of a river cruise ship. And we meet a filmmaker interviewing an older woman whose life was transformed by the political activism of her student years and the Thammasat University massacre of 1976. With her tender, unobtrusive filmmaking style, Suwichakornpong allows us to get to know these characters slowly and deeply. At the same time, we see how their beautiful country and its troubled history inform their actions and identities in ways both overt and subtle.

"A swirl of startling, sensuously rendered transitions, identities sliding among characters, fictions [within] fictions... A heady iconoclast snooping out profound points of exchange between the possibilities of narration." —Dan Sullivan, Film Comment

"Ambitious, enthralling... Ask[s] profound questions about how memory, politics and cinema intersect... Dig[s] for the core of contemporary Thai experience." —Sight & Sound

"An intransigently enigmatic art object." —Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

"Remarkable... Suwichakornpong abdicate[s] logic and directorial control in favor of a strangely intuitive, even random, rethinking of narrative and historiography." —Artforum

"A humanistic portrait of ordinary people linked together by a turbulent history, BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK follows in the same path as the works of Thai directors Weerasethakul, Assarat, and Ratanaruang; but Suwichakornpong expands this idea to the fullest extent." —Kelley Dong, Film Comment

2017 New Directors New Films

2016 Locarno Film Festival

2016 Toronto International Film Festival

2016 Busan International Film Festival

2016 London Film Festival

2016 Vienna International Film Festival

2016 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival