Ecosophy as a Call for Peace

The fantastically alterious population of Apichatpong's film worlds—the mystical creatures, benevolent ghosts and talking animals who repeatedly appear and disappear in their travelling of time—offer an oblique access point into Thailand's war-torn history, especially the American-backed military occupation and communist purging of Isaan province that took place from the 1960s through to the 1980s. As a child, Apichatpong became intimately familiar with the region and its history after his parents relocated their medical practices to the province out of solidarity with its leftist organizing. He witnessed that amidst the violence of the occupation, villagers threatened by the military fled their homes and hid in the jungle. Many of them never returned. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is set in Isaan, and is premised on the affective-historical fact that the region's purging is still felt by the widows and descendants of the disappeared communists, despite the reigning royalist regime's attempts to silence and censor this history in the name of national unity.

Isaan is thus a site of conflicted signification in Thai culture. As a principally rural and agricultural province it lends itself to signifying as “rural utopia” and “cornerstone of Thai heritage,” two ideological discourses taken up by forces as opposed as left-wing intellectuals and royalist-nationalists (Boehler 2011: 293).