Each year, a small number of Japanese tourists arrive in Paris and fall apart: extreme depression, cultural rejection, sometimes hallucinations severe enough to require repatriation. Psychiatrist Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese doctor practicing in France, gave the condition its name after US and UK newspapers picked up the story in the fall of 2006, reporting about a dozen cases a year and a Japanese embassy hotline set up to handle them. Director John Menick treats the syndrome less as a medical mystery than as a symptom of mismatched expectations, interviewing psychiatrists including Jean Garrabé and Philippe Bargain about what happens when idealized notions of French service, manners, and hygiene collide with the actual city. The film widens its frame to Stendhal Syndrome, the fainting spells recorded among art tourists in Florence, and further back to nineteenth-century case histories of travelers diagnosed as mad, using archival footage and psychiatric portraiture to place Paris Syndrome inside a longer history of tourism itself producing breakdowns rather than pleasure.