“Magical, baffling, mirthful, sublime -- it’s everything it’s cracked up to be.” - Chuck Stephens, Film Comment Magazine

“This boldly original, oddly affecting meditation on the afterlife will reward you with moments of profundity that will linger in your consciousness (or subconsciousness) for a lifetime.” - David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle

Wednesday, February 26, 8:00 p.m. | In slow-cinema master Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s (SAIC MFA 1998, HON 2011) Palme d’Or winner, Uncle Boonmee, dying of acute kidney failure, is visited by the ghost of his deceased wife, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. With hushed beauty and delicate restraint, Weerasethakul contemplates the liminal space between life and death, the legacies we leave behind, and fantasies of reincarnation. Also, there is a talking catfish. An ethereal and intoxicating big-screen experience, UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES is a film that permeates. Let it unfold and surround you, and you’ll never forget it.


Awards & Nominations

Winner - Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival
Nominee - Best Foreign Film, Film Independent Spirit Awards


Persistence of MemoryTen films (poetically, all quite memorable) that explore recollection, unreliable narrators and amnesiatic protagonists, ghosts real and imagined, the way others remember us (ouch), and the coming to terms with that, as much as we try to hold on to them, as time passes our memories shift and slip away. Read more


The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu