Thailand’s most internationally acclaimed director will return to France this year with his latest movie, five years after winning the Cannes Film Festival’s top award.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, best known for the 2010 Palme d’Or-winning “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and “Tropical Malady,” will return to France this year with his latest film.
Cannes announced late last month Apichatpong’s “Cemetery of Splendour,” set in his native Khon Kaen, would be entered into competition for the Prize Un Certain Regard, which he previously won in 2002 with “Blissfully Yours.”
Known more provincially and less Cannes-y as “Love in Kohn Kaen,” the film tells the story of a lonely middle-aged housewife who tends to a soldier with sleeping sickness as she herself falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms and romance.
“I write this film as a rumination on Thailand, a feverish nation. It will be the first film that takes place entirely in my hometown, Khon Kaen,” Apichatpong said of his film. “It’s also a very personal portrait of the places that have latched onto me like parasites – the elementary school, the hospital, the library, the lake. Like the sleepers in this film, I shun the malady of reality, and together we take refuge in dreams of forever.”
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