MONDAY NIGHT MOVIE presents SYNDROMES & A CENTURY

Selected & Introduced by Tan Chui Mui

Film Screening

Mon 8 Feb, 8pm

Presented by The Annexe Gallery

Admission Free, bring your own snacks


Monday Night Movie is a series of monthly film screenings at The Annexe Gallery, with titles chosen and introduced (usually) by guest curators. Our seventh title “Syndromes & A Century (2006)” is selected and introduced by award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Tan Chui Mui.

Running time: 158 mins. Thai with English subtitles.

“Syndromes and a Century” (Sang Sattawat) is a Thai drama film written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a tribute to his parents. Divided into two parts which echo each other, with the characters and dialogue in the second half essentially the same as the first, the settings and outcome of the two stories in the film unfold differently – as a gentle examination of the experience of memory and the transformative forces of living.

According to the director, "It's a film about heart. It's not necessarily about love, it's more about memory. It's about feelings that have been forever etched in the heart.” Originally entitled “Intimacy and Turbulence”, the film started out as an autobiographical look at the director’s parents who were b physicians working in a hospital in Khon Kaen, Thailand. But the director revised that concept when he cast the actors and began filming. The story still focuses on a male and female doctor, and is dedicated to the director's parents, but is set in two hospitals 40 years apart and explores both the memories and current lives of the protagonists.

Touching, funny, hypnotic, complex and simple, “Syndromes & A Century” is ultimately about the inexplicability of life.

“Syndromes and a Century” premiered at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. It has since been screened in various international film festivals to critical acclaim. At the inaugural Asian Film Awards in 2007 in Hong Kong, the film won the Best Editor award for Lee Chatametikool. It was also nominated for best director and best cinematographer. In November 2009, the film was announced by Toronto's Cinematheque Ontario as the best of the decade, as voted by more than sixty international film historians, archivists, curators, and programmers.


ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Tan Chui Mui is a Malaysian filmmaker. In 2007, she received the Tiger Award from the 36th International Film Festival Rotterdam for her debut feature film Love Conquers All. The film had previously won the New Currents Awards and Fipresci Award at the 11th Pusan International Film Festival in 2006. She is also a very productive short filmmaker, who has won big prizes in two prestigious short film festivals in the world: Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and Clermont-Ferrand Short film Festival. In 2008 she had a project of making a short film every month. Out of this, she made seven short films, and subsequently titled them “All My Failed Attempts”. Mui has also been actively involved in the Malaysia independent film scene, working as producer, editor, script writer and occasional actress. In 2004, she set up Da Huang Pictures with Amir Muhammad, James Lee and Liew Seng Tat. She has also published a book of Chinese fiction.