The Early Films of Lee Chang Dong

A celebrated literary figure in South Korea whose fiction earned him accolades well before his foray into cinema, Director Lee Chang Dong writes and directs harrowing tales that place his characters in 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) to 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. Lee Chang-dong has written and directed a mere six features in over 20 years, but these exquisite films have placed him among the most admired auteurs in cinema. Celebrate the auteur in his early days with four of his early films and see where it all began...