Syndromes and a Century

"You find yourself moved, even enchanted, by the beautiful, oblique stories unfolding before your eyes....Syndromes And A Century is split in two. The first half takes place at a quiet rural hospital, while the second unfolds at a much larger and more modern urban medical complex... The beauty of the film is an aspect partly of its patient attention to faces, trees, landscapes and architectures, and partly of the subtle precision of the camera movements...I've come to appreciate both the clarity and the mystery of this film, which welcomes you into a world of simplicity and strangeness." - Excerpted from A.O. Scott's review in The New York Times

The film is a tribute to the director's parents and is divided into two parts, with the characters and dialogue in the second half essentially the same as the first, but the settings and outcome of the stories are different. The first part is set in a hospital in rural Thailand, while the second half is set in a Bangkok medical center. "The film is about transformation, about how people transform themselves for the better," Apichatpong said in an interview.[3]

In Thailand, Syndromes and a Century became controversial after the Board of Censors demanded that four scenes be cut in order for the film to be shown commercially. The director refused to cut the film and withdrew it from domestic release.[4] Since then, the director had agreed to a limited showing in Thailand where the cut scenes were replaced with a black screen to protest and inform the public about the issues of censorship.