Watcharachai Kalong’s short drama Dissolve to the Pastroad (ถนนอดีต) begins with a group of students in a guided meditation session, though they are lying face down, in the same position as the students arrested at Thammasat University on 6th October 1976. Anocha Suwichakornpong’s film By the Time It Gets Dark (ดาวคะนอง) begins with actors adopting the same pose. (Dissolve to the Pastroad and By the Time It Gets Dark are among more than seventy films that refer to the attack at Thammasat.)
The students in Dissolve to the Pastroad are set an unusual assignment: to go to the forest and reenact the communist insurgency that took place there following the events of 1976. On the way to the forest, they drive past Democracy Monument, and Vaivit’s song Space and Time (พื้นที่และเวลา) plays on the soundtrack:
“ฉันควรรอเสียบ้าง
บางอย่างจะได้มา
บางอย่างคงจะดี
บางอย่างคงจะฟรี.”
The lyrics — ‘I should wait a little / Something will come / Something will be good / Something will be free’ — comment on the long history of Thailand’s nascent democracy. They also foreshadow a later sequence in which footage of students protesting in the buildup to 14th October 1973 is superimposed over shots of the forest.
The plot synopsis explains that the students are “sent into the forest to explore sites of past violence.” This places Dissolve to the Pastroad within a group of Thai films that explore what the Dutch artist Armando called ‘guilty landscapes’: tranquil spaces that bore silent witness to historical violence. (Thai Cinema Uncensored includes an analysis of guilty landscapes in Thai films.)
Dissolve to the Pastroad was co-written by Koraphat Cheeradit, director of Yesterday Is Another Day and ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, who also stars in the film. It was first shown at Bangkok University’s School of Digital Media and Cinematic Arts on 21st August. It was screened at PYE Space in Phayao on 9th November, and it was included in the second Open Screen programme in Khon Kaen. Its most recent screening was in the online Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน), on 23rd November.
The students in Dissolve to the Pastroad are set an unusual assignment: to go to the forest and reenact the communist insurgency that took place there following the events of 1976. On the way to the forest, they drive past Democracy Monument, and Vaivit’s song Space and Time (พื้นที่และเวลา) plays on the soundtrack:
“ฉันควรรอเสียบ้าง
บางอย่างจะได้มา
บางอย่างคงจะดี
บางอย่างคงจะฟรี.”
The lyrics — ‘I should wait a little / Something will come / Something will be good / Something will be free’ — comment on the long history of Thailand’s nascent democracy. They also foreshadow a later sequence in which footage of students protesting in the buildup to 14th October 1973 is superimposed over shots of the forest.
The plot synopsis explains that the students are “sent into the forest to explore sites of past violence.” This places Dissolve to the Pastroad within a group of Thai films that explore what the Dutch artist Armando called ‘guilty landscapes’: tranquil spaces that bore silent witness to historical violence. (Thai Cinema Uncensored includes an analysis of guilty landscapes in Thai films.)
Dissolve to the Pastroad was co-written by Koraphat Cheeradit, director of Yesterday Is Another Day and ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, who also stars in the film. It was first shown at Bangkok University’s School of Digital Media and Cinematic Arts on 21st August. It was screened at PYE Space in Phayao on 9th November, and it was included in the second Open Screen programme in Khon Kaen. Its most recent screening was in the online Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน), on 23rd November.
