“Make sure we’re not forgotten.”
—
Taklee GenesisChookiat 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 is a notorious incident in Thailand’s modern history, though
it has rarely been represented on screen. The 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.
