NYFF/Views from the Avant-Garde/A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

The schedule for this year's Views from the Avant-Garde series at the New York Film Festival is now online, and as I had hoped, master Thai filmmaker Apichatpong ("Joe") Weerasethakul's new 17-minute short, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, is included. The photos above are taken from Joe's own website, http://www.kickthemachine.com/, where he tells a little bit about the inspiration for the film:

"A few years ago I visited a temple near my home and a monk there gave me a little book called “A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” In it, the monk wrote about Boonmee, who could recall his multiple lives in the cities of the northeast. In 2008, I wrote a screenplay inspired by the reincarnation of Boonmee, and started to travel in the region in search of his surviving offspring and relatives. I met his two sons who provided accounts of their father. In Nabua in December 2008, I located several houses that I thought would be suitable as Uncle Boonmee’s house in the proposed feature film. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

I watched another recent Apichatpong short, Phantoms of Nabua, which was briefly available online a few months ago, and was enchanted with it even on my small laptop screen. I expect the new film, seen on the Walter Reade screen, to truly whet my appetite for Joe's upcoming Uncle Boonmee feature.

The screening times of the main selections are also now posted, and I've added another film to my must-see list, the three-hour independent Chinese documentary Ghost Town. According to some critics, the film's director, Zhao Dayong, may be the next major Chinese filmmaker to emerge since Jia Zhangke.

I've narrowed down my essential NYFF choices to about eight films now. Besides Zhao's film, I'll definitely be seeing the new Alain Resnais, Manoel de Oliveira, Maren Ade, Raya Martin, Claire Denis, Souleymane Cissé and Joao Pedro Rodrigues. The maybe column includes another eight, von Trier, Rivette, Breillat, Solondz, Costa, Porumboiu, Bellocchio and Haneke (all worth seeing, though many of them have distributors already).

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 1: With Juan's help I've now ordered all my tickets, a staggering total of 15 programs in 17 days (assuming I get all the tickets I've ordered). I'm seeing all those mentioned above, minus the Breillat, Bellocchio and Haneke (I'll wait for theatrical release), and adding L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot, a reconstruction of Clouzot's uncompleted 60s experimental film.