Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the feature centerpiece of a larger project, Primitive, that Weerasethakul built around one specific place: Nabua, a village in Nakhon Phanom province in Thailand's northeast. On August 7, 1965, Nabua became the site of the first armed clash between Thai government forces and Communist Party insurgents drawn from the local farming population, and the Thai army occupied the village for roughly two decades afterward, running an operating base there through the early 1980s. Villagers were interrogated, and residents have documented accounts of abuse and killings under the occupation; many fled into the surrounding jungle. Weerasethakul, working with teenage male descendants of that generation of farmers, built the rest of Primitive around them directly: two short films, Phantoms of Nabua and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, both completed in 2009, an artist's book, and video works made with the young men themselves before the feature followed in 2010.
The feature carries that history forward without narrating it as history. Boonmee's private reckoning with the communists he killed and the insects he could not stop killing sits inside a village whose real modern memory is a communist insurgency and a military occupation, so a family's private ledger of karma plays out over ground marked by a specific, documented political violence. The film premiered at Cannes on May 21, 2010, and won the Palme d'Or, becoming the first Thai film and the first work by a Thai director to receive the festival's top award, and it has since been named repeatedly among the strongest films of its era, including a place on Sight and Sound's 2022 critics' poll of the greatest films ever made.