Lee Chang-dong Retrospective: Poetry (2010)
Director: Lee Chang-dong Run Time: 139 min. Release Year: 2010
Starring: Ahn Nae-sang, Kim Hee-ra, Kim Yong-taek, Lee Da-wit, Yoon Jeong-hee
Country: South Korea, France
Language: Korea
About the film:
Winner of the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and Best Screenplay at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
Kind-hearted Mija is tasked with raising her troubled teenage grandson, Jong-wook, while her daughter works in far-off Busan. In denial that her abilities as a caregiver are threatened by the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Mija begins to study poetry writing at the local cultural center. At first she finds inspiration in the beauty of the natural world, but then, when Jong-wook is mired in a shocking scandal, Mija taps into newfound depths of disappointment and pain.
“A deceptively gentle tale with a tender ache at its center, as well as a performance from Yun Jung-hee that lingers long in the memory.”
—Justin Chang, Variety
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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