Lee Chang-dong Retrospective: Peppermint Candy (1999) 4K Restoration
Director: Lee Chang-dong Run Time: 131 min. Release Year: 2000 Language: Korean
Starring: Go Seo-hee, Kim Yeo-jin, Moon So-ri, Sol Kyung-gu, Suh Jung
Country: South Korea, Japan
Language: Korean
About the film:
Official Selection, 1999 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight
Winner of the Special Prize of the Jury at the 1999 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
In the spring of 1999, a group of old friends gather to celebrate their 20 year reunion. Among the group is Yeong-ho, a cold, unhappy man, whose demeanor puts a damper on the festivities. The seriousness of Yeong-ho’s depression becomes apparent when he climbs a railroad bridge and looks like he might jump. At this crucial moment, memories of seven crucial episodes from Yeong-ho’s past flood his mind.
“Peppermint Candy is a compelling and powerful work and a necessary to any introduction to the Korean New Wave.”
—Rahul Hamid, Senses of Cinema
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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