FILMMAKER'S NOTE

When I was a child, I lived in hospital environments for twelve years. My parents were doctors who raised us kids in a house provided by the small-town hospital where they worked. My mother often brought me to her office, a dimly lit room overlooking a children's ward. This room was my playground, my station to look at people. Nearby was a pond where patients and relatives fed the fish. From the room's window, you could see people having lunch and sleeping in the corridor, out of the sun. In retrospect, everything seemed to move in slow motion.

Recently I went back to the hospital and found myself lost. Everything had changed and the familiar spaces were gone. As a film-maker, I have been fascinated by the spaces of a small town and its landscape. But I had never really looked at the place where my family lived. Now, with my hometown changing rapidly and becoming more like Bangkok, my memories of the lost spaces seem even more distant. With the waves of globalization affecting the way we live and how we make films, my desire to make a real personal recollection has become more intense.

Syndromes and a Century is a contribution to the New Crowned Hope festival, a project that will explore how we remember, how our sense of happiness can be triggered by seemingly insignificant things. It is an experiment in recreation of my parents' lives before I was born, which also includes the lives of those who have touched me in the present day. It will be an interpretation of distant lives and of architectures that I remain fond of, along with contemporary ones that I have around me. Time is collapsed to mimic a pattern of remembering and to manifest my belief in the idea of reincarnation. We are constantly reborn, amassing our karma, and we learn from our successive lives in order to one day finally experience a true happiness.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (written in 2005, before the start of production)