Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Year: 2010
Country: THAILAND
Run Time: 113 minutes

UNCLE BOONMEE is a haunting, dreamlike tale of a dying man's last internal and external voyages. Uncle Boonmee's kidneys are failing and he retires to the countryside in northeast Thailand to see out his days in the company of his loved ones. He tends to his bees and gazes at the lush nature surrounding him. One evening as he's dining with his family, his wife Huay, who died 14 years earlier, appears at the table. So does an apparition of Boonmee's long-lost son. Thus begins a conversation that drifts into the night, and in and out of consciousness, as Boonmee questions Huay on what awaits him in the afterworld, and whether she'll be there when he arrives. UNCLE BOONMEE defies normal narrative conventions and resists interpretation. The delicate Thai language and the film's meditative cinematography underscore the grace with which its protagonists accept life and death-past, present and future-and memory and clairvoyance as part and parcel of one floating world. (In Thai with subtitles) – B.B.

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