Great artists tend to experience intense, emotional, visual recollections of earlier times in their lives, which they feed through their heightened imaginations and their heightened senses of awareness in order to forge their most powerful art. Such artists are, by definition, rare, and it is to our great collective benefit that one was recently discovered in Thailand, in film, by the name of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, director of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

As the final piece of a multi-platform art project, beginning with a seven part video installation, followed by two short films on the combined subject of memories, transformation and extinction, Uncle Boonmee emerges as a discrete and powerful masterpiece on the subject of the spiritual beyond.

The main character, Uncle Boonmee, is slowly dying of kidney failure, and, in a way that Thai culture tends to see the beyond as existing alongside the here and now, Uncle Boonmee begins to see (and to be visited by) spirits of the dead, either in human form or as they might otherwise, strangely, present themselves. These spirits are symbols, not only of the main characters past, but also of the artists own past, drawn together into the films narrative, fabric and characters.

Set in the Thai jungle, with its preternatural stillness and eeriness, Uncle Boonmee is a gentle, ethereal and slightly unhinging collection of peculiarly associated experiences and successful film experiments, which conspire subtly to unlock and to access the unconscious parts of the mind, wherein lies resolution to so much that is unfathomable in the course of normal, conscious thinking.