Lee Chang-dong Retrospective: Oasis (2002) 4K Restoration
Director: Lee Chang-dong Run Time: 132 min. Release Year: 2002
Starring: Ahn Nae-sang, Moon So-ri, Ryoo Seung-wan, Sol Kyung-gu, Son Byung-ho
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
About the film:
Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director and Best Young Actress at the 2002 Venice Film Festival.
Fresh out of prison, Hong Jong-du finds an unlikely soulmate in Gong-ju, the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run accident for which he went to jail. Wheelchair-bound and suffering from severe cerebral palsy, Gong-ju is kept cloistered in a cheap apartment by her brother, whose only concern is the government assistance she receives. Over a series of clandestine meetings, the two begin an improbable relationship that defies the judgment and cruelty of the world around them.
“A love story of two young people marginalized by family and society that becomes a scorching indictment of the indifference, cruelty and hypocrisy of those institutions as the couple inevitably come into profound conflict with them.”
—Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
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.
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