Continuing his miraculous invention of a dark pastoral, Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, melds the last dying encounters of a farmer, Boonmee, with a gorgeously rendered landscape enlivened by the presence of ghostly apparitions. A veranda perched by an intruding forest becomes the astral stage for Boonmee's transmigrational journey, accompanied by his dead wife, an ectoplasmic entity, and his long-lost son, now manifested as a “monkey ghost.” Weerasethakul's humble genius is his beguiling ability to allow the primordial and the modern to coexist. This is not magical realism, but realistic magic.