Thursday, May 24 | 8 pm
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is an epic, career-defining exploration of Thai culture, film history, and the director’s own remarkable body of work. Severely ill with kidney disease, Boonmee spends his final days surrounded by family at his tamarind farm in northern Thailand. As time goes by and the boundary between life and afterlife grows thin, Boonmee is visited by the ghost of his wife and a red-eyed jungle spirit who was once his son. He also finds himself inundated with dreams and visions that reveal his past incarnations in various animal forms. Deftly incorporating iconography and stylistic flourishes drawn from classical Thai cinema, sci-fi B movies, and twentieth-century experimental film, Apichatpong creates a playful, moving, richly polyphonic work that stands as one of the new millennium’s finest cinematic achievements.
Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 2010 | In Thai with English subtitles | 114 minutes | NR | 35mm