Credits: screenplay: Apichatpong Weerasethakul; director of photography: Sayambhu Mukdeepram, Yukorntorn Mingmongkon, Charin Pengpanich; editor: Lee Chatametikool; production design: Akekarat Homlaar; costume design: Chatchai Chaiyan; producer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Simon Field, Keith Griffiths, Charles de Meaux; production: Illuminations Films presents A Kick the Machine Films and Illuminations Films Past Lives Production;

Country: Thailand, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands

Year: 2010

Running time: 114

Colour: Colour

Format: 35 mm

The film garnered Cannes’s Palm d’or from a jury led by Tim Burton, who told reporters that the film took him to “another reality.” For Weerasethakul, the film is his reality, a reflection of his belief in reincarnation, coupled with a love for early Thai cinema. Humans in animal form have blazing red eyes, as in the Thai movies from his youth, and the characters speak with little inflection, as they did in those films. Uncle Boonmee himself, played by a nonprofessional roofer, is a dying man who is visited by ghosts of his loved ones. Weerasethakul inserts a sequence with a bull, and one with an aging princess being serviced by a catfish, all of whom may or may not be some of his earlier incarnations; the viewer decides. The film is beautiful to look at, with many long takes honoring the jungle landscape and people of northeast Thailand. Howard Feinstein