Love and Time: A Screening of Assistant Professor Anocha Suwichakornpong ’06's film, 'Come Here'

By
Angeline Dimambro
January 24, 2023

Come Here (2021), a film by Assistant Professor Anocha Suwichakornpong ’06, will be screened at the e-flux Screening Room in Brooklyn, New York on January 26, 2023, at 7pm ET.

Opened in December 2020, the e-flux Screening Room presents cinema, video art, and experimental film from artists around the world. The space is designed to welcome encounters between curated screenings of today’s key moving-image works and conversations with artists, curators, and theorists through discursive events, seminars, and lectures.

Suwichakornpong’s Come Here follows four friends in their mid-twenties as they go on a trip to Kanchanaburi, a province in western Thailand. They’ve embarked on this trip to see 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. When they find that the museum is closed for refurbishment, they must find other ways to pass the time.

Still from 'Come Here'

In a piece written for The Film Study Center at Harvard University, Suwichakornpong discussed some of the intentions and inspirations behind the film: “The starting point for Come Here was that I wanted to make a film about young people. This inevitably led me to questions about love. 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 one's dutiful relationship to the nation, religion, and king.”

Get your tickets for the screening here and watch the trailer for the film below.

Anocha Suwichakornpong is an independent filmmaker who lives and works in Bangkok and the US. Her films have been screened at festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, Berlin, Locarno, and Rotterdam. Anocha’s work, informed by the socio-political history of Thailand, has received much international critical acclaim and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York and TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto. She founded the Bangkok-based production company, Electric Eel Films, to nurture works by emerging talents from Thailand and abroad, and co-founded Purin Pictures, a film fund that supports and promotes independent Southeast Asian cinema. Anocha is a 2019 Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Program recipient. She has taught filmmaking at Harvard University, Mahidol University, and joined the directing faculty of Columbia University’s Film Program in the fall of 2022. Anocha received her MFA from Columbia in 2006, with her thesis film, Graceland (2006), becoming the first Thai short film to be officially selected by Cannes Film Festival.