Anocha Suwichakornpong
Anocha Suwichakornpong, Associate Professor of Film at the School of the Arts, is an independent filmmaker who lives and works in Bangkok and the U.S. 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 in the fall of 2022, Anocha joined the MFA film program at Columbia University as a film directing faculty.
In Paris, Suwichakornpong plans to conduct pivotal research for her feature film A.S.R., focusing on Thailand’s historical transition to democracy, with a particular emphasis on Paris as a hub for Siamese political exiles and dissidents, which will enrich the film’s final segment set in the present day and shot at the former house of key revolutionary figure Pridi Phanomyong.