Lee Chang-dong Retrospective: Green Fish (1997) 4K Restoration
Director: Lee Chang-dong Run Time: 111 min. Release Year: 1997
Starring: Dong Bang-woo, Han Suk-kyu, Moon Sung-keun, Shim Hye-jin, Song Kang-ho
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
About the film:
Winner of Best Film, Screenplay, Director, and Actor from the Korean Film Critics Association.
Released from his mandatory military service, Makdong returns to a hometown he no longer recognizes. After rescuing a beautiful young woman from harassment on a train, his life takes an unexpected turn when she unwittingly lures him into the criminal underworld. Finding himself in a dangerous love triangle with the local crime boss, Makdong must face the dire consequences of his choices.
“On the surface, it’s a noir… but beneath the surface lurks a patient, meditative and uncompromising look at loneliness and the extent we’ll go to avoid it. “
—Walter Chaw, RogerEbert
About the filmmaker:
Lee Chang-dong is a South Korean director, screenwriter, and novelist. When he was young, he hoped to become a painter, but he made a name for himself in the theater and literary worlds. Chang-dong did not get come into filmmaking until he was nearly 40, beginning his career as a screenwriter and assistant director for Park Kwang-su, a key figure of the Korean New Wave of the late 1980s and 1990s. He has written and directed only six features across more than twenty years, but these exquisite films have placed him among the most admired and respected auteurs in cinema.
A celebrated academic and novelist in South Korea whose fiction earned him accolades well before his foray into cinema, Lee writes and directs harrowing tales that place his characters in extreme psychological and physical agony to test the limits of the human spirit. An elderly woman at the onset of Alzheimer’s confronts her grandchild’s utter indifference to morality in Poetry (2010); a single mother endures a cascade of tragedies in Secret Sunshine (2007); a man suffers the forces of South Korea’s tumultuous history in Peppermint Candy (1999). His tightly structured plot lines deliver unflinching exposés of pain, trauma, and rage. He appears to follow conventional genre tropes, from melodrama to noir and gangster flicks, only to subvert audience expectations with exceptionally complex stories that leave them to contemplate perplexing existential, spiritual, and moral questions. Green Fish (1997) is Chang-dong’s highly celebrated directorial debut.
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