Lee Chang-dong: Three Restoration Premieres
Filmmaker, playwright, and novelist, Lee has been a vital force in South Korean culture since the publication of his first novel, "Chonri," in 1983. After breaking into the film industry as the screenwriter (and assistant director) of Park Kwang-su’s 1993 "To the Starry Island," Lee matriculated to the post of director with 1997’s "Green Fish," and with that film and his five subsequent features, established himself as both a brilliantly understated delineator of character and a quietly outraged chronicler of the afflictions of South Korean society. With the US streaming premieres of new restorations available of three of Lee’s features—"Green Fish," "Peppermint Candy," and "Oasis"—we survey the brilliant career of one of South Korea’s supreme artists… and one of its harshest critics.
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Green Fish
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 111 mins | 1997
Already established as a novelist and playwright, Lee made the leap to the director’s chair with this spectacularly assured first feature, a scourging commentary on South Korean society dressed up in film noir trappings, focused on a freshly demobbed y... -
Peppermint Candy
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 130 mins | 1999
Opening on a shocking scene of implied suicide, Lee’s sophomore feature proceeds to move backward in time, its reverse chronology following its protagonist’s unhappiness to its source, following him from the end of the ’70s to the close of the ’90s—yea... -
Oasis
Directed by Lee Chang-dong | 133 mins | 2002
Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for whic...
