JANUS FILM CLUB: Uncle Boonmee + The Age of the Dragon

At the Janus Film Club, we pair contemporary Hungarian short films with feature-length films that have inspired them or are connected to them. This allows these short films—which are far too rarely screened—to be presented to audiences once again in a fitting context and to become part of the mainstream of film culture.

For our second event, we will screen Marcell Farkas’s short film *Dragon Age*, accompanied by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s *Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives* (2010).

In Weerasethakul’s meditative film, Uncle Boonmee is visited by the spirit of his son, who has turned into a monkey demon, and his wife, whereupon he decides to visit the place where he was born in his very first life, recalling his past lives along the way.

The heroes of Dragon Age are also on a journey; a couple in love make a blood pact on the roof of a parking garage and decide to trick God. The mythologizing, auteur-driven fantasy’s search for a path is the most intriguing phenomenon in contemporary cinema.

What kind of world do these stories offer a window into—one of too few or too many memories, of the past, of tradition? Do we have a connection to our past, our world, our loves?

Dragon Age (30 min) + Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (114 min)

144 minutes, color, in Hungarian and Thai, the latter with English subtitles

Gergely Havassy & Zsigmond Farkas, guest: Marcell Farkas