Co-presented with the 2010 Calgary International Film Festival.
Visit the CIFF website for more info or to buy tickets.

Boonmee, a widowed land owner, struggles with failing kidneys and loneliness. Retreating to his farm with his closest family and supporters, Boonmee prepares for his final phase and together the family recollects lazy memories. Strangely, forest ghosts and creatures transformed from Boonmee’s past begin to gather at the home for a nighttime mix of inexplicable myths and animalistic fable.

This year’s Palm D’Ors winner at Cannes has already been touted as the most experimental and critically deserving film to screen on the French Riviera in some time. Having transitioned from hisses at Cannes in 2004 to standing ovations in 2010, the world finally seems ready to appreciate the distinct and subtle cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is proof that this filmmaker is a one-of-a-kind master, and those willing to succumb to this film will be forever intrigued by the ease with which it bleeds between beautiful naturalism and puzzling fantasy.CIFF

[Apichatpong] is also a polarizing figure in Thailand, although not as much for his films, which until recently were barely known among the general public, as for his championing of anti-government protesters and his biting critique of the political establishment.
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But Uncle Boonmee does not come across as a political film. Still, Mr. Apichatpong's empathy for northeastern Thais, who have traditionally been manual laborers and farmers, shines through. The film's characters disparage big-city life and speak a dialect close to the Lao language, which is not spoken by people born and raised in Bangkok. To the outside world Uncle Boonmee is a Thai film, but viewers in Bangkok relied on Thai subtitles to understand the northeastern vernacular.Thomas Fuller, 2010, NYT

Like most of his feature films, Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee is set in Isan province, where he grew up. It playfully invokes both the lifestyle and animistic beliefs of the Northeast country folk, and the primitive magic of early Thai cinema, relating both of these to his musings on reincarnation … This view of reincarnation as all beings coexisting in one non-linear universal consciousness is also central to Apitchatpong's conception of cinema as the medium with the power to replay past lives and connect the human world to animal or spiritual ones. That may be why he shot the last scenes involving parallel worlds in 16mm, as homage to the format of film in his childhood memory. His casting of actors or roles (like a monk, a Burmese worker) from previous films in also a kind of reincarnation of the director's cinematic past lives.

The director's film language has always been experimental, intuitive and personal to the point of mystical … The natural locations (especially the cave glittering in the dark) exude cosmic energy, while sound extracted from wildlife plays as significant a role as an animate being.Maggie Lee, 2010, The Hollywood Reporter