Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee, who lives in a house on a farm with his sister-in-law Jen and his nephew Tong has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly Huay, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, he treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave - the birthplace of his first life.
Uncle Boonmee can be a very difficult film to get into, and if you're not invested from the start it's going to be a tough watch. The reason I say that is because the pace is really slow and scenes come and go very much like a slow, meditative walk through a thick forest. I'm not even sure I grasped it all on a first viewing so it's definitely one of those films you need to watch again to get the whole picture. It's a story about life and death, it's about rebirth and facing one's mortality.
At the Cannes film festival people reportedly walked out after only six minutes, but it still won the most prestigious award of them all, the Palme d'Or.
Genre: Drama/Fantasy
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