Starring Moon So-ri
While the renaissance in South Korean cinema that picked up speed through the 1990s is often discussed in terms of directors, it’s impossible to imagine without thespians of the caliber of Moon So-ri, whose career choices speak of an unusual daring and curatorial intelligence. Making her debut in Lee Chang-dong’s "Peppermint Candy" (1999), as followed by his next film, "Oasis" (2002)—in which her performance as a young woman with cerebral palsy won her the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice—she has consistently made herself essential in the best of her homeland’s cinema. Active on stage and a director in her own right, Moon, like Isabelle Huppert, with whom she appeared in Hong Sangsoo’s "In Another Country" (2012), offers a compelling case for the actress as auteur—a case this selection, comprising two films by Hong and two by Lee, organically makes.
-
Peppermint Candy
Leaving November 1
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 th... -
Oasis
Leaving November 1
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 t... -
Hahaha
Leaving October 1
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 115 mins | 2010
Two friends in a bar trade stories about their romantic exploits at a beach, which we come to realize involve the same people (including a restaurant owner played by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung). Through adroit layering, Hong brings ... -
Hill of Freedom
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 66 mins | 2014
The progress through a hopelessly shuffled stack of love letters inspires the a-chronological structure of Hong’s Hill of Freedom, which describes the terse long-distance relationship between a Korean woman and the Japanese man who has built an ardent ro...
