As a practitioner straddling cinema’s constantly shifting borders, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s outline of filmmaking is, in many ways, to rip the very fabric of motion pictures to shreds. What irony, then, that it is Thailand’s ravenous Censorship Board who intends to take to the director’s latest film with an axe. Make no mistake: Weerasethakul’s films coax extreme reactions, from the indescribable euphoria of watching his Blissfully Yours unfold with all the logic of a mid-film opening credit sequence, to the countless patrons who fled, vindicating in their sheer horror the brave new world that ‘Joe’ (his abbreviated moniker) was cultivating. He would return to the jungle with Tropical Malady: opaque, elongated, and even more spaced-out, the astonishing transcendence of the film had some of us entranced, while others bored shitless. His most recent, Syndromes and a Century, was due to open in the director’s homeland, only to be confiscated on the grounds of four “objectionable” scenes: two involving monks playing a guitar and with a toy flying saucer; another two involving “inappropriate” conduct by doctors on the job. As such, the censors refuse to release the film until cuts are made.

Regardless of the perceived cultural/social insensitivity on display, these instances are surely innocuous in nature compared to the homosexuality of Malady, or the full-frontal genitalia of Blissfully Yours – aberrations you would expect to draw attention in super-strict Thailand. Debating within context what’s acceptable and what’s not is beside the point though: at the bleeding heart is the principle of it all, and Weerasethakul’s staunch refusal to cave has created a stalemate. An online petition (petitiononline.com/nocut/petition.html) is attempting to rectify that. The last time I signed one of these was when SPCS bore down on the Incredible Film Festival’s acquisition of Irrèversible and Ken Park. Both those films saw the light of day, and the hope is that this petition will go some way to unshackling Syndromes and a Century, if not Thai movie legislation itself (on the home front, New Zealand censorship laws could do with their own overhaul – another editorial altogether). The likelihood that a mere fraction of Thailand’s public will pay to see Weerasethakul’s film may render this ‘Free Thai Cinema Movement’ meaningless to some, but in an industry both dominated by the violent bludgeonery of Ong-Bak, and seemingly embarrassed by Joe’s international status as an ambassador of Thai Cinema, its pertinacity ought not to be underestimated. As discerning, filmgoing adults, we ignore it at our own peril.—Tim Wong