I'm continually impressed with how Weerasethakul resists the dogmatism of his dichotomies. Mostly a film about the differences between rural and urban life, and coming out in the end on the side of rural (or at least on the fusion of rural and urban that a robust public park system provides), he nevertheless finds room for nice moments of fellowship in the antiseptic Bangkok hospital (the ladies with liquor in the leg, the young man who plans to have the same life as everyone else, except it will take one year longer) as well as failed interpersonal connections out in the country (the several unfulfilled romances circling Dr. Toey and of course the legend of the farmers who find gold…

"The water inside your head will wash away everything and vaporize into the sky."

If we define the filmography of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in terms of his marriage of the particular and the universal (as I attempted to do here), Syndromes and a Century is for me his most sublime creation because of how deeply rooted it is in the particular. In this equation of "particular → universal," the universal may ultimately be more important, but there's no getting to it without an anchor in the particular, and here Weerasethakul finds perhaps his strongest anchor. He began the film as an autobiographical story about his parents, and although it slowly transformed after casting the lead actors, it remained an intensely personal…

"Normally I sing about teeth and gums, but this album is all love songs"

With SYNDROMES & A CENTURY, Apichatpong Weerasethakul sorta-makes his own version of Tarkovsky's MIRROR: a fractured, beautiful, cyclical autobiography in cinema. Tarkovsky's film was concerned with the whole: inward-facing, but dealing with lost innocence, a desperate search for God and the scope of human existence. Early in on his film, Weerasethakul seems much more interested in the part, the details, the specifics, the ground-level, the things you won't notice unless you stop, look and listen.

From the very first shot, the warm, sensual atmosphere present throughout his TROPICAL MALADY is all around us again: the weather is impossibly pristine, the sun is shining, the trees are blowing…

No one makes meditative films as well as Apichatpong Weerasethakul. My first couple encounters with the director were primarily confusing, but the more I see, the more I ease into his style, slowing the racing thoughts in my brain as I match pace with the movie. Each Weerasethakul is unlike nearly anything else I've watched, discarding narrative and traditional logic for occurrences that are somehow both more mundane than a mainstream movie would allow, yet also more magical. There's a "boring" immediacy to watching several minutes of an interview or a concert without any story momentum, though it's all wispy and dreamlike, suggesting a sort of eternal recurrence of souls.

Often when watching films from outside my home country (America),…

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a genie.

The poetic nature of this film is based on love and time.
And how love transcends space and time.

Unbelievably beautiful with so much depth, its a film that is heavily based on interpretation and leaves you thinking forever about each scene and moment, i believe this kind of cinema is the future.
Films that can stay with you forever, films that can touch you deeply to the extent others can't.
The poetic nature of Apichatpong's films always leave us thinking and looking for answers, i feel thats where he differs from many great directors of the 21st century.
To get the audience to leave a film feeling the way he makes them feel is…

After postponing it for a while due to a fear of its complexity, I finally watched my first film by director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It's definitely something dense that I couldn't grasp completely, which didn't really allow me to fully connect with the things I was watching. I think it's more about me and what went over my head than the movie itself, but the slow pace made it a little more difficult.

Regardless, there's a lot of beauty here, something really contemplative and meditative that I really love. There is calm and peace in Joe's direction, and I really like the way he handles space and how it influences the characters. I see this story (or I think I do,…

For the first 20 minutes of Syndromes and a Century I loved it. Then I hated it. Then I loved it again and so on and so forth. My experience went something like this:

Day 1 – Fell asleep after 40 minutes.
Day 2 – Started over from beginning and fell asleep at 65 minutes.
Day 3 – Started where I left off and finished the film in its entirety though groggy and confused.

I’m usually not the type to fall asleep during movies but something about this damn thing lulled me into la-la land. It’s very much one of those films that is near impossible to explain, because it doesn’t have an easily identifiable (at least to me) narrative…

☆"Are you my brother reincarnated?'
"I can't be. I wasn't human in my past life."☆

Once again, Apichatpong Weerasethakul divides a film starkly between two halves, as he did in the dreamscape of Blissfully Yours and the shamanistic masterpiece of Tropical Malady, this time in a story that was created as a tribute to his parents, two medical doctors. Here in S̄æng ṣ̄atawǎat ["Syndromes and a Century"], perhaps the most abstract work yet from the Thai filmmaker, a transcendental experience of life and family comes forth. And then, reprise.

A plot description is challenging for this film, but the skeleton of it is based on two characters meant to be fictional versions of Weerasethakul's parents: Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul) and…

Siempre recuerdo lo desconcertantes que fueron mis primeros encuentros con el cine de Apichatpong. Los adjetivos que solía ver normalmente asociados a su nombre me habían empujado a pensar que sus películas, envueltas por algún critico u opinador muy ruidoso en este halo de cine autoral pretencioso y enrevesado, debían de ser de estas obras difíciles de atravesar e imposibles de comprender que exigen un gran esfuerzo al espectador por mantener la atención e interpretar su mensaje y sus intenciones.

Lo desconcertante viendo Syndromes and a Century o cualquiera de sus grandes obras es que no solo es imposible encontrar nada de esto sino que uno llega incluso a tener la sensación de que igual se está perdiendo algo porque…

After postponing it for a while due to a fear of its complexity, I finally watched my first film by director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It's definitely something dense that I couldn't grasp completely, which didn't really allow me to fully connect with the things I was watching. I think it's more about me and what went over my head than the movie itself, but the slow pace made it a little more difficult.

Regardless, there's a lot of beauty here, something really contemplative and meditative that I really love. There is calm and peace in Joe's direction, and I really like the way he handles space and how it influences the characters. I see this story (or I think I do,…