Rousseau Film Series: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

About the Event

This special three-part film series is presented with our latest exhibition, Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets. Curated by BlackStar Film Festival founder Maori Karmael Holmes, each screening highlights directors and collaborators who were influenced by Rousseau and the generation of surrealist artists he inspired. The films’ use of whimsy, mystical themes, deep blacks, and, in some cases, lush forest imagery evoke Rousseau’s best-known works.

Today’s screening centers on director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s feature-length film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), a meditative and surreal exploration of memory, death, and rebirth. Dying of kidney disease, a man spends his last, somber days with family, including the ghost of his wife and a forest spirit who used to be his son, on a rural northern Thailand farm. The screening will be followed by a brief lecture and conversation with Lendl Tellington, a versatile storyteller working across film, photography, journalism, and experiential art.

This program takes place in the Comcast NBCUniversal Auditorium and includes access to the Barnes collection and Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets.

Don’t miss our other film screenings:
November 8: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
January 10: Short Films

About the Film

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apichatpong won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for this gently comic and wholly transporting tale of death and rebirth, set in Thailand’s rural northeast. Uncle Boonmee, a farmer suffering from kidney failure, is tended by loved ones and visited by the ghosts of his wife and son. As for his remembered past lives, they might—or might not—include a water buffalo, a disfigured princess, a talking catfish, and the insects whose chirps engulf the nighttime jungle scenes in this sensory immersion. Uncle Boonmee is an otherworldly fable that lingers on earthly sensations, a film about a dying man that’s filled with mysterious signs of life. Apichatpong’s vision is above all a generous one: in the threat of extinction, he sees the possibility of regeneration.
Duration: 114 min

This film contains mature themes, brief nudity, and supernatural elements—but is not rated; viewer discretion is advised.