Scene of Oct.จากรอยแผลสู่อนาคต

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. An exhibition organised by Thai PBS, Scene of Oct. จากรอยแผลสู่อนาคต (‘from scars to the future’), will examine the incident from multiple perspectives.

Scene of Oct. will feature poetry, music, and art inspired by 1976, and quotes from films that depict the events at Thammasat. It will even include a board game based on the incident.

The exhibition is part of the VIPA International Film Festival 2026. VIFF runs from 11th to 25th September, and Scene of Oct. is on show from 21st September to 16th October, at the Thai PBS offices in Bangkok.

Old Path in the Deep Dark Forest: Blinding Flash and Echo Fire

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. The incident remains one of the most shocking moments in Thailand’s modern history.

There are more than seventy films and videos that refer to 6th October. To commemorate this year’s anniversary, MAIIAM in Chiang Mai will show a trio of these films every weekend this month.

The screening programme, Old Path in the Deep Dark Forest: Blinding Flash and Echo Fire (รอยทางเก่าในป่าลึก: แสงวาบและเสียงก้อง), features a documentary, a short film, and a music video. The screenings are part of MAIIAM’s exhibition A Reconfigured Archive (จดหมายเหตุนอกบรรทัด).

ชวนอ่านภาพ 6 ตุลา
(‘invitation to read images of 6th Oct.’)

In Chulayarnnon Siriphon’s documentary ชวนอ่านภาพ 6 ตุลา (‘invitation to read images of 6th Oct.’), viewers from different generations interpret a series of photographs of the incident. The images, many of which were previously unpublished, were shown at the Facing Demons (เผชิญหน้าปิศาจ) exhibition at Kinjai Contemporary in 2022.

The documentary was originally commissioned for Facing Demons. It has since been shown at the Doc Club Festival and Doc Club Festival Selections in 2024, and at Chulayarnnon’s I a Pixel, We the People (ข้าพเจ้าคือพิกเซล, พวกเราคือประชาชน) exhibition at Bangkok CityCity last year.

Don’t Forget Me

In Manussak Dokmai’s short film Don’t Forget Me (อย่าลืมฉัน), archive footage of 6th October is accompanied by narration from a documentary on the Mlabri tribe. The narrator describes the tribe’s traditional rituals and customs, providing a blackly comic counterpoint to the violent imagery from 1976.

Don’t Forget Me has been screened numerous times since its original release in 2003, and was shown most recently at Thammasat in 2024. It was part of the Histoire(s) du thai cinéma [sic] (‘histories of Thai cinema’) programme of short films at Dam’n Cineclub in 2018, and the Chiang Mai Now! (เชียงใหม่นาว!) exhibition at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2011.

ยูงทอง 6 ตุลา
(‘golden peacock 6th Oct.’)

The music video ยูงทอง 6 ตุลา (‘golden peacock 6th Oct.’) features photographs of the 1976 massacre and right-wing newspaper reports demonising the students. These brutal images are accompanied by ยูงทอง (‘golden peacock’), a song written by King Rama IX in 1962 that became Thammasat’s official anthem.

As in Don’t Forget Me, the visuals and soundtrack are a deliberate and bitterly ironic contrast: the anthem’s lyrics espouse love, unity, and serenity, while the images on screen depict extreme intolerance, hatred, and division. The video was produced by United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration, one of the key protest groups that instigated the student-led rallies calling for institutional reform in 2020.

After 6มรดก 6 ตุลา

After 6 มรดก 6 ตุลา (‘the legacy of 6th Oct.’), a new play by Natthapat Mardech, will be staged at T.Nam Charoen Playhouse in Bangkok later this month. Performances will take place on 11th, 12th, and 13th September.

The play is set in 1980, four years after the 6th October 1976 coup, a time when military rule had become the new normal. The drama’s four characters are lawyers who meet to discuss how to eradicate the legacy of the coup.

After 6 is Natthapat’s second play about the events of 1976. Last year, he directed Rashomon 6 ตุลา (‘Rashomon 6th Oct.’), which was also set four years after the coup.

Tickets for After 6 cost ฿112, a reference to the lèse-majesté law, which is article 112 of the Thai criminal code. Last year, advance tickets for Prapassorn Konmuang’s play The Ordinary (คนธรรมดา) also cost ฿112, for the same symbolic reason.

October 6th: A Reconfigured Archive

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. The bodies of the victims were desecrated by baying mobs, and the incident remains one of the most shocking moments in Thailand’s modern history.

MAIIAM in Chiang Mai is commemorating the anniversary with a group exhibition devoted to the incident, October 6th: A Reconfigured Archive (จดหมายเหตุนอกบรรทัด 6 ตุลาคม 2519), which opened on 10th July and runs until 30th November. The exhibition features artworks commenting on the Thammasat massacre alongside books and other archival materials documenting the event.

The exhibition includes Nutdanai Jitbunjong’s installation A Massacre: a folding chair suspended from the ceiling. The chair is an iconic signifier of the massacre, thanks to Neal Ulevich’s photograph of a man preparing to hit a corpse with a folding chair. Nutdanai’s chair is made from tamarind wood, as the dead man in Ulevich’s photo was hanged from a tamarind tree. A Massacre was previously shown in the Status in Statu (รัฐพิลึก) and Khon Kaen Manifesto (ขอนแก่น แมนิเฟสโต้) exhibitions.

Several works from Taiki Sakpisit’s exhibition Dark Was the Night (ผีพุ่งไต้) are included, notably his video installation of the same title and his photograph Half Day Closing, an image of the notorious ‘red elevator’, which — according to legend — is haunted by victims of the 1976 attack. The lift was discussed in the documentary Ghosts, and it inspired the horror film Haunted Universities (มหาลัยสยองขวัญ).

Thasnai Sethaseree has produced numerous paintings that refer to 1976. The exhibition features three of his untitled collages: news photos of the incident heavily obscured by colourful overpainting. They were also shown in a previous MAIIAM exhibition, Errata.

Other paintings in the exhbition include Patcharapa Inchang’s Father, Lawan Upa-In’s ก่อน ๖ ตุลา ๒๕๑๙ (‘before 6th Oct. 1976’), and Ronagorn Kerdchot’s 16 19 35 (๑๖ ๑๙ ๓๕). The title of Ronagorn’s work refers to the years 1973, 1976, and 1992 according to the Buddhist Era calendar, and all three periods are associated with episodes of state violence.

Thanavi Chotpradit and Kornkrit Jianpinidnan’s book Prism of Photography is on display, alongside a photograph from Kornkrit’s Damage series. The book is a visual archive of the massacre, featuring dozens of Thai newspaper front pages and news photographs. ฟ้าใหม่ ใกล้มา (‘dawn of victory’), a ‘museum in a box’ featuring meticulously reproduced artefacts from 1976, is also on show.

To contextualise the events of 1976, the exhibition also features Arin Rungjang’s And Then There Were None, a series of paintings based on news photographs from 14th October 1973, a date almost as infamous as 6th October 1976, when a mass protest led to the (temporary) collapse of a military dictatorship. Her video of the same title, an interview with singer Boonchuang Denduang that begins with archive footage from 1973, is also included. Arin’s paintings were shown alongside Thasnai’s in Errata.

นิรโทษกรรม จำเลยคดี 6 ตุลา(‘amnesty for the 6th Oct. defendants’)

The documentary นิรโทษกรรม จำเลยคดี 6 ตุลา (‘amnesty for the 6th Oct. defendants’) will be shown at Thammasat University’s Faculty of Law on 5th July, as part of an event titled ครึ่งศตวรรษรัฐประหาร 6 ตุลาฯ ถึงเวลาลบมรดกบาป (‘half a century after the 6th Oct. coup, it’s time to erase the legacy of sin’). The film was previously screened at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 25th February 2017.

นิรโทษกรรม จำเลยคดี 6 ตุลา was compiled from news footage of the announcement in 1978 of an amnesty for the Thammasat students who were arrested following the 6th October 1976 coup. The amnesty was proposed by Kriangsak Chamanan, the de facto leader of another coup in 1977. In the film, Kriangsak is seen at a press conference with the students, which was held at his home, in a performative display of national unity and reconciliation.

Of course, the students were the surviving victims of the event, not the instigators of it, and the perpetrators — various right-wing paramilitary groups — never faced any charges. However, the documentary begins with a summary by Channel 7 that accuses the students of provoking the massacre, citing their reenactment of the hanging of two men arrested for campaigning against the return of former dictator Thanom Kittikachorn. The film shows the notorious photograph of that reenactment printed in the Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper, and the student actor in the photo, Apinan Buahapakdee, was one of those who were charged before the amnesty was granted.

Thongchai Winichakul was also one of those charged and pardoned. In Moments of Silence, he wrote about his memories of attending the press conference at Kriangsak’s house, noting that the amnesty was presented not as the reversal of an injustice but as a pardoning of the students’ perceived offences: “throughout the entire encounter, Kriangsak treated us as the wrongdoers, such as by telling us not to repeat past mistakes. This definitely reflected his view, and possibly that of all of those in power as well.”

The documentary was one of six films about Kriangsak’s political career issued on VCD in 2006, collectively titled ที่ระลึกงานพระราชทานเพลิงศพ พลเอกเกรียงศักดิ์ ชมะนันท์ อดีตนายกรัฐมนตรี 12 พ.ย. 2549 (‘souvenir from the royal cremation ceremony of general Kriangsak Chamanan, former prime minister, 12th November 2006’). They were part of a commemorative box set given to those who attended his funeral.

วัน (ไม่) สำคัญ(‘the (not) important days’)

วัน (ไม่) สำคัญ, at Hope Space in Bangkok, is a series of activities commemorating significant political events that took place over the years in the month of October. The title, which translates as ‘the (not) important days’, is deeply ironic, as some of the most notorious dates in modern Thai history — not least, 14th October 1973 and 6th October 1976 — are related to October.

วัน (ไม่) สำคัญ runs from 16th to 31st October. Tomorrow, there will be screenings of two documentaries — Patporn Phoothong and Teerawat Rujenatham’s The Two Brothers (สองพี่น้อง), and Vichart Somkaew’s When My Father Was a Communist (เมื่อพ่อผมเป็นคอมมิวนิสต์) — followed by a Q&A with Vichart titled ความทรงจำสีแดง (‘red memories’).

The short film The Two Brothers features interviews with relatives of two young men who were hanged by police for campaigning against the return of former dictator Thanom Kittikachorn from exile. It has previously been screened at Thammasat University in 2025, 2020, and 2017. It was last shown at Hope Space on 2nd October 2024.

For When My Father Was a Communist, Vichart interviewed his father and other former members of the Communist Party of Thailand. The film has been screened around the country, including at Phimailongweek (พิมายฬองวีค) in Korat, and at the Chard Festival (ฉาด เฟสติวัล) in Phatthalung. It was last shown at Hope Space on 16th August.

On the same day as the Hope Space screening, When My Father Was a Communist will also be shown at the Fair Boy coffee shop in Lopburi, as part of a day-long event titled ตุลาที่ฝันถึง (‘the October I dream of’). The film’s next scheduled screening is at Yang Nam Klat Nuea in Phetchaburi on 29th November.

49 ปี 6 ตุลา(‘49 years since 6th Oct.’)

The forty-ninth anniversary of the 6th October 1976 massacre was commemorated at Thammasat University today. Two short plays were staged at the Sri Burapha Auditorium, and the Museum of Popular History held an exhibition, ความหวังยังพริ้งพราย เก่าตายมีใหม่เสริม (‘hope still shines brightly: the old dies, and is replaced by the new’), which compared student activism in the 1970s to the student protest movement that began in 2020. The exhibition itself didn’t include the notorious Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper front page that sparked the massacre, though a small reproduction of it was part of a display outside the entrance.

In 6 ตุลา x ราโชมอน (‘6 Oct. x Rashomon’), by Natthapat Mardech, a young man returns to Thammasat four years later to learn the truth about the massacre, though everyone he speaks to gives a different account of what happened, in the same way that Rashomon (羅生門) also recounts a violent event from multiple perspectives. The play’s props include a folding chair and a reproduction of the Dao Siam front page, both of which are closely associated with the massacre.

It will be performed again — under the slightly revised title Rashomon 6 ตุลา — on 15th and 16th November, at TK Park in Bangkok’s CentralWorld mall, as part of the Bangkok Theatre Festival 2025 (เทศกาลละครกรุงเทพ 2025), which runs from 8th to 23rd November. The Thai films The Outrage (อุโมงค์ผาเมือง) and The Murderer (เมอร์เด้อเหรอ ฆาตกรรมอิหยังวะ) were also inspired by Rashomon.

The title of the other play, Ultramarine: Threat (by ShiVa Vitthaya), hints at a symbolic meaning of the colour blue, and the production featured forty-five extras playing the massacre victims. It also included a projected backdrop of images from the 1976 massacre. (Both productions were photographed by the artist known as Khai Maew.)

The first event marking the forty-ninth anniversary took place last month. ห้วงแห่งความเงียบงัน: ภาวะลืมไม่ได้จำไม่ลง หลัง 6 ตุลา 2519, a Thai translation of Thongchai Winichakul’s book Moments of Silence, featuring illustrations by Tawan Wattuya, has been published to coincide with the aniversary. A similar commemoration was held on the forty-eighth anniversary last year.

Thai Political Milestones, no. 3:6th October 1976

On 6th October 1976, forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed in a military massacre at Thammasat University in Bangkok. The bodies of the victims were desecrated by baying mobs, and the incident remains one of the most shocking moments in Thailand’s modern history.

The Thammasat students had been protesting against the return from exile of Thanom Kittikachorn, the coup leader who had fled into exile in 1973. The circumstances surrounding Thanom’s arrival back in Thailand in September 1976 remain unclear: was his return orchestrated to provoke a demonstration and justify another coup?

Thanom had previously returned in December 1974, against the wishes of the prime minister. On that occasion, 10,000 Thammasat students protested against him, and he left the country again two days later. But in 1976, he remained in the country, and ordained as a monk in a performative, and provocative, gesture of repentance.

On 25th September 1976, two anti-Thanom activists (Choomporn Thummai and Vichai Kasripongsa) were hanged by the police, and on 4th October 1976 a group of Thammasat students staged a reenactment of the hanging. One of the students who posed as a victim, Apinan Buahapakdee, coincidentally bore a passing resemblance to Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn (who is now King Rama X).

On its front page on 6th October 1976, the nationalist Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper printed Apinan’s photograph and its headline accused the students of hanging the Prince in effigy. Again, the circumstances are unclear, and there are rumours that the photo was retouched to accentuate the royal resemblance.

The political atmosphere reached boiling point following the Dao Siam headline, which sparked an invasion of the Thammasat campus by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. But tensions had been simmering for several months, after an interview with Kittivuddho Bhikku, an influential monk, appeared to give nationalist paramilitary groups a licence to kill.

The monk was quoted by จัตุรัส (‘square’) magazine on 29th June 1976 saying that, for Buddhists, killing a communist would bring more merit than disgrace. His temple later published a booklet titled ฆ่าคอมมิวนิสต์ไม่บาป (‘killing communists is not a sin’), which expressed the same incendiary statement more succinctly.

Another issue of จัตุรัส magazine, featuring a cover photograph of Thanom in his monk’s robes, was published on 5th October 1976. In 2021, a ‘museum in a box’ — called ฟ้าใหม่ ใกล้มา (‘dawn of victory’) — was produced to commemorate the atmosphere of that day, the eve of the masssacre.

Thai Political Milestones:

• no. 1: ‘Black May’
• no. 2: 14th October 1973

เก็บตกวงเสวนา 49 ปี 6 ตุลา: เมื่อเรื่องราว 6 ตุลาไม่ได้ถูกจำกัดไว้เพียงที่ธรรมศาสตร์ (‘a briefing on the 49th anniversary of 6th Oct.’)

เก็บตกวงเสวนา 49 ปี 6 ตุลา: เมื่อเรื่องราว 6 ตุลาไม่ได้ถูกจำกัดไว้เพียงที่ธรรมศาสตร์ (‘a briefing on the 49th anniversary of 6th Oct.: the 6th Oct. event is not limited to Thammasat University’), held today at Thammasat University’s Faculty of Political Science, featured a Q&A with Patporn Phoothong, co-director of the short film The Two Brothers (สองพี่น้อง). The event was a precursor to the upcoming forty-ninth anniversary of the massacre that took place at Thammasat on 6th October 1976.

The Two Brothers was screened as part of today’s event. Directed by Patporn and Teerawat Rujenatham, the documentary features interviews with relatives of two young men who were hanged by police for campaigning against the return of former dictator Thanom Kittikachorn from exile. When student actors at Thammasat staged a reenactment of the hanging, the right-wing Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper falsely accused them of hanging an effigy of the Crown Prince (now Rama X), and this inflammatory headline sparked the massacre.

The brutal events of that notorious day are encapsulated in a much-reproduced photograph by Neal Ulevich, which shows a vigilante preparing to beat a hanged corpse with a folding chair. In reference to that image, today’s event included a folding chair on display.

The Two Brothers was previously shown at Hope Space in Bangkok last year, at Thammasat in 2020 and 2017, and at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya in 2017. Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses this and other Thai films that refer to the 1976 massacre.

The Ulevich photograph has become so ubiquitous that a folding chair has become a symbol representing the entire massacre. Karnt Thassanaphak’s photo-montage The Decaying Chair (เก้าอี้ที่กำลังผุพัง), for example, shows a rusting chair, its gradual decay representing the artist’s hope for an eventual end to state violence. (The image was created from more than 1,000 photographs of protesters campaigning against the lèse-majesté law, and it was first exhibited at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in 2013.) Similarly, Chatchawan Thongchan’s short film From Forest to City (อรัญนคร) features a shot of a folding chair, and there is a children’s book about 6th October titled The Folding Chair Stars (ดาว เก้าอี้).

Taklee Genesis

“Make sure we’re not forgotten.”
— Taklee Genesis

Chookiat Sakveerakul’s Taklee Genesis (ตาคลี เจเนซิส) will be shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 14th and 23rd July, as part of the พระเจ้าช้างเผือกและหนังเพื่อสันติภาพอื่นๆ (‘The King of the White Elephant and other peace films’) season. Taklee Genesis features time travel, dinosaurs, kaiju monsters, zombies, cavemen, the Cold War, a dystopian future, and the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University, all woven together into an ambitious sci-fi epic.

In a prologue that takes place in May 1992 (an unspoken reference to ‘Black May’), a young girl witnesses “dead bodies falling from the sky.” These are students who died during the Thammasat tragedy, their bodies teleported by the Taklee Genesis device, a time machine that can create alternate realities. As one character says: “Taklee Genesis was used to cover up a massacre.”

When the girl, Stella, grows up, she learns that her father was a CIA agent involved in the development of the Taklee Genesis. One of the project’s test subjects, Lawan, was transformed into a forest-dwelling spirit, like the monkey ghost in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ), another supernatural personification of the legacy of the Cold War.

Stella and her friend Kong use the Taklee Genesis to travel back in time to Thammasat on 6th October 1976, after Kong discovers that he is one of the massacre victims who fell from the sky. Chookiat recreates the violence of that day, showing Red Gaur militiamen gunning down students. A young boy stands alone on a balcony laughing at the carnage, in a reference to a smiling onlooker in a photograph by Neal Ulevich. (The artist Khai Maew created a model of the child, which he called Happy Boy.)

Thanks to the Taklee Genesis, Kong has the chance to fight back against the vigilantes who have stormed the campus. This fantasy scenario, in which a Thammasat victim is given the agency to tackle his potential killers, is similar to the alternate history narrative in Preecha Raksorn’s comic strip Once Upon a Time at..., in which the victim in Ulevich’s photograph escapes from his assailant.

Discussion of the Thammasat massacre was suppressed for years, not by the fictional Taklee Genesis device, but instead by successive military governments. Today, it’s primarily through photographs of the event, particularly the famous image by Ulevich, that the incident is remembered. In one of the film’s most powerful moments, Kong takes a roll of film from the camera of his Thammasat classmate and gives it to Stella, telling her: “Make sure we’re not forgotten.”

The Thammasat massacre has been referenced in more than seventy films, though the violent 6th October scenes in Taklee Genesis are almost unprecedented. The only previous attempt to dramatise the brutality of the event was in the horror film Haunted Universities (มหาลัยสยองขวัญ), which was cut by the Thai film censors.

Ghosts: Confronting the Dead in Thailand

Ulf Svane and Paul McBain’s new documentary Ghosts: Confronting the Dead in Thailand includes an interview with Thongchai Winichakul filmed at Thammasat University. Dozens of students at Thammasat were killed on 6th October 1976, and Thongchai is Thailand’s foremost authority on the history of that brutal event. (He has written about it extensively, including in his English-language book Moments of Silence.)

In the documentary, Thongchai discusses Thammasat’s notorious ‘red elevator’, which — according to legend — is haunted by victims of the 1976 attack. There are unlikely to be genuine apparitions haunting the lift, though such tales of ghosts are a reminder of the spectre of history: Thongchai stresses the need to “confront the ghost, or talk about the ghost”, in order to come to terms with traumatic historical events.

Ghosts is the latest of more than seventy films that refer to 6th October 1976. Previously, the Thammasat elevator inspired the horror film Haunted Universities (มหาลัยสยองขวัญ), which was censored to remove dramatisations of the violence that took place on that day. Also, a photograph of the elevator doors, titled Half Day Closing, was part of filmmaker Taiki Sakpisit’s exhibition Dark Was the Night (ผีพุ่งไต้).

ย้อนรอยแผลเป็น 6 ตุลา(‘retracing the scars of 6th Oct.’)

A display of items related to the 6th October 1976 massacre of students at Thammasat University opened at Thammasat’s Museum of Anthropology on 25th April, and runs until 30th August. The exhibition, ย้อนรอยแผลเป็น 6 ตุลา (‘retracing the scars of 6th Oct.’), is a scaled-down version of ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’), held at Thammasat last year. Both events were organised by the Museum of Popular History.

The current exhibition includes Hangman, a painted silhouette of a hanged student, displayed alongside a list of the names of the massacre victims. It also features the contents of ฟ้าใหม่ ใกล้มา (‘dawn of victory’), a ‘museum in a box’ released in 2021.

Fall

Nipan Oranniwesna’s solo exhibition Fall was held at Jing Jai Gallery in Chiang Mai, from 1st March to 2nd June. The exhibition included several works from 2020 that refer to events leading up to the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University. An installation from the exhibition, Then, One Morning, They Were Found Dead and Hanged, was previously shown at the Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai.

Then, One Morning, They Were Found Dead and Hanged dominated the gallery floor, with capital letters carved from teakwood that read “THEN, ONE MORNING, THEY WERE FOUND DEAD AND HANGED. IT WAS LATER ESTABLISHED, THAT THEY WERE DONE TO DEATH BEFORE THEY WERE HUNG.” This text refers to Choomporn Thummai and Vichai Kasripongsa, two men who were hanged by police from a gate in Nakhon Pathom on 25th September 1976, after they campaigned against military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn’s return from exile.

Thammasat students staged a reenactment of the hanging on 4th October 1976, and the right-wing Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper reported this on its front page two days later, with a photograph of one of the students, Apinan Buahapakdee. Apinan bore a slight and coincidental resemblance to King Vajiralongkorn, who was Crown Prince at the time, and the newspaper accused the students of “แขวนคอหุ่นเหมือนเจ้าฟ้าชาย” (‘burning the Crown Prince in effigy’). It was this incendiary and false headline that led vigilante groups to storm the campus.

Nipan’s teakwood text appears on painted clouds, which are based on a photograph taken by the artist on 24th June 2020, the anniversary of Thailand’s 1932 transition to a constitutional monarchy. This metaphorical reference — the sky as an indirect allusion to the monarchy — has also been employed by other artists: t_047’s single ไม่มีคนบนฟ้า (‘no one in the sky’), and Wittawat Tongkeaw’s installation Creation-Conclusion (เริ่ม-จบ). Wittawat commented on the metaphor with the title of his painting It’s Just the Sky, Nothing More.

The gate from which the two activists were hanged was rediscovered by Patporn Phoothong in 2017. A photograph of the gate (simply titled Gate) was also part of Fall, shown alongside framed reproductions of a twelve-page account of the Thammasat massacre — titled Ungpakorn [sic] — typed by Puey Ungphakorn (a former rector at Thammasat) on 25th November 1976.

Patporn made a short documentary about the case, The Two Brothers (สองพี่น้อง), and exhibited the gate itself at Thammasat in 2019. A split-second image of the gate appears in Tewprai Bualoi’s short film Friendship Ended with Mudasir Now Salman Is My Best Friend (มิตรภาพสิ้นสุดกับ Mudasir ตอนนี้ Salman คือเพื่อนที่ดีที่สุดของฉัน). The gate has inspired several paintings, including Jirapatt Aungsumalee’s ประตูแดง (‘red gate’) and Pachara Piyasongsoot’s What a Wonderful World, and the poster Just Because You Can’t See It, Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Happen.

Oblivion: The Original Texts

The short film Oblivion: The Original Texts (เลือน: บทประพันธ์ดั้งเดิม), a collage of found footage woven into a magical realist allegory, begins with the sound of gunshots, stills from the recent film Taklee Genesis (ตาคลี เจเนซิส), and a voiceover in which a student, Burindh, describes the 1976 massacre at Thammasat University: “A gunshot has been fired. Sending its vibrating wave upon my chest.”

As the poetic voiceover continues, the narrator recalls how he fled not only from the Thammasat campus but from Bangkok itself, which “is not the city of the people. It is not the city of ordinary people”. (These lines are juxtaposed with vintage newsreel footage of the Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall and the Grand Palace, symbolic buildings that have also featured in some of the director’s previous short films.)

As he escapes from his attackers, Burindh asks: “if I don’t possess this ideology that’s different than them, would they still aim their bullets at me?” The question is as relevant now as it was in 1976, as riot police fired rubber bullets at student protesters in 2021 and 2022. The film uses footage of a protest against Ampon Tangnoppakul’s conviction for lèse-majesté, taken from the short film Ashes, to hint at the ideology of Burindh and the recent protesters.

In 1976, a prominent monk, Kittivuddho Bhikku, pronounced that killing communists was equivalent to merely catching fish, in a signal to the royalist vigilante groups who stormed the Thammasat campus a few months later. Images of fish in the documentary The Terrorists (ผู้ก่อการร้าย) were metaphors for the monk’s comments, though Oblivion goes a stage further: Burindh transforms into a goby fish and swims away from Bangkok.

Burindh’s metamorphosis is similar to that of Boonsong, the monkey spirit in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ), another student who fled from persecution and transformed into an animal. Burindh meets Boonsong, his (literal) kindred spirit, who reassures him that his memories (and, by implication, Thailand’s political traumas) will not be forgotten as long as they are retold.

Oblivion is the latest of more than seventy films that refer to the Thammasat massacre. (The previous examples are discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored.) It was directed under the pseudonym Burindh the Golden Goby.

6th October Filmography

This week marks the 48th anniversary of the 6th October 1976 Thammasat University massacre. The tragic event has been referenced in more than seventy films and videos, which are all listed in this filmography. Many of these titles are discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored, which features a comprehensive survey of Thai political cinema.

งานรำลึก 48 ปี เหตุการณ์ 6 ตุลาฯ 2519(‘commemorating the 48th anniversary of 6th Oct. 1976’)

This week, Thammasat University will commemorate the 48th anniversary of the 6th October 1976 massacre. A pop-up exhibition, ต่างความคิดผิดถึงตาย (‘deadly misconceptions’), will be held at Thammasat’s Sri Burapha Auditorium from tomorrow until 6th October. (A documentary with the same title was released on DVD in 2011.) At the same time, Thammasat’s Pridi Banomyong Library will host 6 ตุลาฯ กระจกส่องสังคมไทย (‘6th Oct., mirror of Thai society’), an exhibition exploring the wider context of the event. (These exhibitions were scheduled to open today, but as of this afternoon the library display was cordened off and the auditorium was closed.)

Three short documentaries will be screened at Thammasat on 5th October. Respectfully Yours (ดวยความนบถอ), directed by Patporn Phoothong and Puangthong Pawakapan, features interviews with families of massacre victims. For The Two Brothers (สองพี่น้อง), Patporn and Teerawat Rujenatham interviewed relatives of the two young men were hanged by police for campaigning against the return of Thanom Kittikachorn from exile. In Manussak Dokmai’s Don’t Forget Me (อย่าลืมฉัน), archive footage of 6th October is accompanied by narration from a documentary on the Mlabri tribe, providing an ironic counterpoint to the violent imagery.

There will also be an exhibition by the Museum of Popular History at Thammasat on 6th October, ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’). Elsewhere in Bangkok, another 6th October photography exhibition, ไม่ใช่ 6 ตุลาฟื้นคืนชีพ แต่รากเหง้าของ ปัญญาชนนั้นยังอยู่ (‘not a 6th Oct. resurrection, but intellectual roots remain’), will open at Hope Space tomorrow. The Two Brothers will be screened there on the opening day.

ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’)

The Museum of Popular History will stage an exhibition at Thammasat University on 6th October, to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre that took place there on 6th October 1976. The exhibition, ก่อนจะถึงรุ่งสาง 6 ตุลา (‘before the dawn of 6th Oct.’) at Sri Burapha Auditorium, will examine the long-term causes of the massacre, particularly the anti-communist propaganda prevalent in the media during the 1970s.

Using newspapers and posters from the period, the exhibition will highlight the language and imagery used to demonise the Thammasat students. (Many of the items will also be shown at a similar one-day exhibition, October Stories: Uprising and Strike Back, at Srinakharinwirot University on 17th October.)

Books and supplements related to the 14th October 1973 protests will also be on display, as will the contents of ฟ้าใหม่ ใกล้มา (‘dawn of victory’), a ‘museum in a box’ released in 2021. The poster Just Because You Can’t See It, Doesn’t Mean It Didn’t Happen features outlines of the bodies of the two men hanged for protesting against Thanom Kittikachorn’s return from exile. Ladkrabang Politics, a group of students from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Ladkrabang, painted a silhouette of a hanged student — Hangman — alongside a list of the names of the victims of 6th October.

Hangman will be displayed with a folding chair propped up against it, in a reference to a much-reproduced Neal Ulevich photograph of the massacre, and a chair is also featured on the poster advertising the exhibition. As a direct result of the Ulevich photo, this single item of furniture has come to symbolise the entire Thammasat massacre. It also appears, for example, on the cover of 2444, a collection of short stories by Manot Phromsing; and on the cover of the third edition of Kwanchai Dumrongkwan’s Memoirs of October 6, 1976 (มนุษย์ 6 ตุลา).

Hope Space

Hope Space in Bangkok will commemorate the anniversary of the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University with the ไม่ใช่ 6 ตุลาฟื้นคืนชีพ แต่รากเหง้าของ ปัญญาชนนั้นยังอยู่ (‘not a 6th Oct. resurrection, but intellectual roots remain’) exhibition from 2nd to 27th October. The show features photographs of the events of 1976, and of the 14th October 1973 protest. Contact sheets will be displayed on tables for examination via a loupe.

A photocopy of a complete edition of the infamous 6th October 1976 issue of Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) will also be on display. The front page is also reproduced in the current issue of the journal South East Asia Research (vol. 32, no. 2).

Patporn Phoothong and Teerawat Rujenatham’s short documentary The Two Brothers (สองพี่น้อง) will be screened on the opening day. Silenced Memories (ความทรงจ ไรเสยง), directed by Patporn and Saowanee Sangkara, will be shown on 13th October.

On show alongside the Thammasat exhibition is 20 ปีตากใบ เราไม่ลืม (‘20 years of Tak Bai, we will never forget’), a photography exhibition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Tak Bai incident, including a large image of the protesters displayed on an easel. Walai Buppha’s new Tak Bai documentary 20 Years Later will be shown on 20th October, the day after its premiere at TK Park in Narathiwat.