Thai Director Wins Top Cannes Prize

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d'Or top prize at the Cannes film festival Sunday for a surreal reincarnation tale, Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives).

The news came at the end of the tumultuous week in Bangkok. To this the director said: “Thailand needs some kind of hope in other ways. We’re very depressed about the confrontation of different ideologies. I hope more or less the news of the prize in the culture sector will help cool down the situation. Hopefully.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul made history Sunday night when his film won the Palme d’Or at the 63rd Festival de Cannes -- the first Thai and first Southeast Asian film to win the world’s most prestigious film award.

 The nine-member jury led by Tim Burton handed the top prize to Loong Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) amid the loud cheers of international journalists who rooted for this formidable dark horse from Thailand.

“This is surreal,” Apichatpong, 40, said in his acceptance speech. “I thank all the ghosts and spirits in Thailand that made this possible.”

Uncle Boonmee, the most accessible of Apichatpong’s films, shows the possible co-existence between humans, ghosts, spirits and animals. In the story about a Northeastern beekeeper who’s dying from kidney disease and who’s visited by the spirit of his dead wife, the film also alludes to the troubled history of the Northeast, the communist fighting, paralleled space and time, the reincarnation of body and soul, as well as provides a meta-thesis on the death and rebirth of cinema through a subtly comical and mystical narrative.

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