Upon a lying woman’s blue sheet, a flicker of light illuminates her insomnia.
Realizador: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Syndromes and a Century explores how we remember; how our sense of happiness can be triggered by seemingly insignificant things. It is a film in two parts which sometimes echo each other.The two central characters are inspired by the filmmaker’s parents, in the years before they became lovers. The first part focuses on a woman doctor and is set in a space reminiscent of the world in which the filmmaker was born and raised. The second part focuses on a male doctor and is set in a more contemporary space much like the world that we live in.
Something magical is in the air. Times are happy and love is uncomplicated for young soldier Keng and country boy Tong. The film starts with a sensual love story, pleasant evenings with Tong’s family and song-filled nights in town… Then life is disrupted by a disappearance. And some kind of wild beast has been slaughtering cows. Local legends say a human can somehow be transformed into another creature… Then begins a tale of a soldier who goes alone into the heart of the tropical jungle, where myth is often real.
A slowly moving camera captures the interiors of various houses in a village. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers. It is unclear whether they are exhuming or burying something. The voices of three young men are heard. They repeat, rehearse, memorise a letter to a man named Boonmee.
Visual musical poem, in which Sakda tells us who he is while his sound spreads to the flow of the Mekong River. We feel in each shot of this short film the heartbeat of its unique filmmaker – Joe, whose red-eye ghosts accompany us through a sensorial film experience. (M. V.)