Anocha Suwichakornpong

Learn how Bellagio helped acclaimed Thai film director Anocha Suwichakornpong find the space to research her latest project: a film that deals with Thailand’s socio-political history.

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a Thai film director, producer, and screenwriter. Her work deals with Thailand’s socio-political history. At Bellagio in May 2022, Anocha was developing her latest film project, ASR. The title stands for the three kingdoms of Thailand: Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, and Rattanakosin.

As well as directing, Anocha co-manages a non-profit film fund specifically for Southeast Asian cinema called Purin Pictures. The fund supports film projects across production and post-production, as well as screenings and workshops. Her 2017 film By the Time It Gets Dark won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand’s National Film Awards and was chosen as the Thai entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. She teaches at Columbia University.

At the time, I had been researching several eras in Thai history for a feature film that I was working on called ASR. This was my first time working on a period feature, so there was a lot of research that took quite some time. Rather than continue writing the script, I went to the Bellagio Center with the idea of restructuring the treatment that I’d already written, as new ideas had emerged that I wanted to explore.

The film’s premise focuses on a woman who lives across time and is an eyewitness to the collapse of the three kingdoms of Siam, as Thailand was then known. I didn’t want the film to take the route of other Thai historical dramas: with epic style, sweeping narratives and lavish costumes. Very often, these epics are usually about warriors, kings and the glory of kingdoms, but this film is instead a history from a commoner’s perspective – and a woman’s at that.

In recent years, there’s been a surge of nationalism in Thailand. Period TV dramas, in particular, have become a hugely popular form of propaganda that fuels that ideology. My aim is to subvert this genre of Thai media. Going to Bellagio helped me achieve this because I could do a lot of research in Italy. While there, I had the chance to read some history books that I couldn’t get access to because they are banned in my country. I had to take the opportunity to read them while abroad! A few of the cohort offered to keep the books for me to retrieve once I moved to the U.S. in the fall [of 2022].

When I first arrived for the residency, it seemed like everyone had known each other for a long time. The experience clearly inspired camaraderie among the fellows. There were constant discussions. Whether directly related to the project I was working on or not, I learned something new. For example, I learned a lot about Indian cinema from Devesh Kapur [Professor of South Asian Studies at John Hopkins University], who’s a cinephile. He gave me a list of directors whose work I’m excited to explore. I also got quite close to Lucia Cuba [Assistant Professor of Fashion Design at Parsons, the New School University] and Shahzeen Attari [Associate Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington].