Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

The film's title character is not invented. Apichatpong Weerasethakul based Uncle Boonmee on a real book, A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives, written in 1983 by the Buddhist abbot Phra Sripariyattiweti. The abbot's book recounts the case of a layman, Boonmee, who approached him claiming that while meditating he could clearly remember a sequence of his own former lives, an experience the abbot recorded and published as an account worth examining rather than dismissing outright. Weerasethakul read it years before he began the film and eventually traveled to the area to search for the real Boonmee's surviving relatives and to learn what he could about the actual man behind the book's claim.

What the film keeps from that source is the structure, not a strict biography. Its own Boonmee is dying of kidney failure at a farm in Thailand's northeastern Isan region, and as his family gathers he begins to see, and to be seen by, figures the film treats with the same unhurried realism as everything else on screen: the ghost of his dead wife returning to sit at the dinner table, and his long missing son, transformed years earlier into a red eyed, ape like spirit of the jungle. Boonmee attributes his illness to karma, specifically to communists he killed and insects he destroyed farming across his own lifetime, a plainly Buddhist accounting of cause and consequence carried by a dying man doing the arithmetic on his own life rather than by any character preaching it to him. The abbot's premise, that a person's past lives remain genuinely accessible to memory, becomes in Weerasethakul's hands a family drama conducted as though that premise were simply true.

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.