CANNES, France – Korean actress Jeon Do-yeon, who stars in a tragic movie on death and faith, “Secret Sunshine,” won the Cannes film fest’s Best Actress award Sunday.
The 34-year-old actress was acclaimed for her brave performance as a grieving wife and mother in the Korean melodrama, the first picture in four years by Lee Chang-dong, a former Korean culture minister.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” said Jeon, wearing a silver evening gown.

“There are many fabulous actresses here at the festival, and I would like to represent them all here tonight. It is a great honor for me to have this prize.”

She appears in nearly every scene of Lee’s two-and-a-half-hour-long film, portraying Shin-ae, a piano teacher who moves with her son to the hometown of her late husband, whose death is still the source of nearly unbearable pain.

She dotes on her young son as a link to his father, and the two have a palpably close relationship. When, in a cruel and unexpected twist in the story, the small boy is abducted and killed, Shin-ae turns to evangelical Christianity on the advice of her pharmacist, a devout believer, as a means of dealing with her grief. Filled with religious fervor, she decides to visit her son’s murderer in prison to tell him she has forgiven him. But she is horrified when the killer tells her with a serene smile that he has repented and God has already offered him absolution. “Who is God to forgive him before I have?” she asks her Christian friends in a rage.

Jeon is known in Korean cinema as a chameleon who fully inhabits her roles. She shot to stardom at home with her debut in the 1997 romance “The Contact.”

The following year she starred as a schoolgirl in “Harmonium in My Memory” and picked up Korea’s prestigious Blue Dragon and Grand Bell prizes for best actress.

Jeon scored a box office hit in 2003 with a remake of “Dangerous Liaisons” and won rave reviews in 2005 for her portrayal of a prostitute who contracts AIDS in “You’re My Sunshine.”

“Secret Sunshine” was one of two Korean movies competing for the Palme d’Or. Kim Ki-duk presented “Breath,” starring Taiwanese actor Chang Chen as a man on death row who falls in love with a scorned wife.

Source: The Korean Herald, Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Secret Sunshine: Trailer

Jeon Do-yeon´s career overview (no english subtitles), watch the visuals of her previous film roles

“Secret Sunshine” also opened in Korea on Thursday. The movie depicts the pain of the heroine, played by Jeon Do-yeon, who feels betrayed by both life and religion. Answering questions from reporters, Lee said the movie is about human beings, not about religion. “I wanted to pose question about the meaning of pain in our life. And I wanted to depict the process to heal the pain.” When a Danish reporter asked what it means that two Korean films are screened in competition this year, the director answered, “Essentially, the creative spirit of filmmakers is important in producing movies, not their nationality.” But he predicted it would encourage Korean filmmakers.
Questions about the movie’s stars were as warm as sunshine. Stéphane Boudsocq from French radio channel Radio RTL showered female lead Jeon Do-yeon with compliments, saying her acting was the most impressive in all the movies he watched in the competition. Jeon said her 10th film gave her new energy, and that was her biggest achievement. Song Kang-ho, who stars opposite her, also praised Jeon’s acting.

Eighteen of the 22 films competing at Cannes have now been screened. Promising contenders include the Coen brothers’ “No Country For Old Men”, Cristian Mungiu’s “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” and Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, with high ratings by film magazines like Screen and Le Film Français. The winner of the grand prix Palme d’Or will be announced on Sunday, when the festival ends.

(englishnews@chosun.com )
Updated May.25,2007 09:39 KST

‘Secret Sunshine’ Asks Existential Questions
“Secret Sunshine,” which opens May 24, asks the fundamental question, “Is life understandable?” The movie is already attracting plenty of hype, not just because it is director Lee Chang-dong’s first movie in four years but because it will be screened in competition at the Cannes International Film Festival. Ostensibly a melodrama, it repeatedly asks questions about the nature of human beings. Can human beings understand the truth, other human beings and God? Why is it so hard to find an ultimate answer despite all our efforts? The answers depend on the audience, though Lee’s movie certainly does not seem to have a happy ending.

The film follows Jong-chan, played by Song Kang-ho, a confirmed bachelor who owns a car repair shop and falls in love with Shin-ae, played by Jeon Do-yeon. He starts to follow her around. The two could not be more different: Shin-ae moved to the town only because it is the hometown of her dead husband, for whom she still grieves. Jong-chan is an ingratiating snob.

The turning point is the abduction of Shin-ae’s son. The little boy, who is everything his mother has left, is kidnapped by the principal of a tutoring institute he attends, and dies. Shin-ae becomes a devout Christian after the tragedy and decides to forgive the murderer. But she is utterly shocked when she visits a prison, where the murderer makes his confession with a smile, saying, “God has already forgiven me.” The movie, in other words, focuses on a woman who has been betrayed by both life and religion.

Lee has coaxed great performances from actors including Han Suk-kyu in “Green Fish,” Seol Kyung-gu in “Peppermint Candy” and Moon So-ri in “Oasis.” With Song Kang-ho and Jeon Do-yeon, he once again has two unforgettable leads. Song Kang-ho gives a fine performance, complete with convincing dialect, and Jeon Do-yeon proves her reputation by projecting the whole range from innocence to sensuality and horror.

The supporting cast are excellent. Mostly unknowns, some of them theatre actors from the Ulsan and Daegu region, they were selected through auditions.

At the end of the movie, Shin-ae’s brother comes to visit and asks about the town. Jong-chan answered in his rough dialect, “Not much different from other places. Milyang is the same as other cities where people live.” The movie induces a kind vertigo with a sense of how difficult life is to understand.

(englishnews@chosun.com )
Updated May.2,2007 09:53 KST

Source: International Herald Tribune
By Joan Dupont,Published: May 23, 2007

CANNES: It is difficult to picture Lee Chang Dong, the director of “Secret Sunshine,” going up the red carpet. Lee, who was minister of culture in Korea, is a shy person and surely the most discreet director at this festival.

His film, which is in competition, looks quiet too. “Secret Sunshine” opens on a fable: a gentle young widow, a piano teacher, goes to a small town with her child. It is her husband’s hometown, and the early signs are promising: people seem welcoming, the pharmacist smiles at her, and her small son adapts to his new school.

“I adapted the story from a novella,” the director said in an interview. “It was called the ‘Story of Insects,’ by Lee Chung Joon; I read it in the 1980s. It stayed with me.”

The director, 53, speaks in a whisper, which makes conversation tricky, especially at a lunch table – there’s no such thing as a quiet one at Cannes – and with an interpreter in the middle.

“The kernel of the story touched me. And I thought about it for a long time, before I even made films. Later, in between films, I thought about it again, and about the fate of the heroine.”

The woman’s child is kidnapped.

This is Lee’s fourth movie. A novelist and a professor who teaches film at the Korean National University of the Arts, he never thought he would become a filmmaker. But in the late 1980s, with video players in homes and the rise of what was called the New Wave, cinema became part of Korea’s changing society. Lee worked as an assistant on a film, “To the Starry Island” (1994) by Park Kwang-Su, a New Wave director.

Today, with only four films Lee stands out on the current scene, an intellectual who searches the hidden significance in ordinary lives. This is his originality, and what gives a sense of mystery to his films.

He is a director who switches genres: “Green Fish” (1997) was a gangster movie. “Peppermint Candy” (2000) has a story that goes backward, a time trip, partly inspired by Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal.” “Oasis” (2002), which he calls a kind of love story, won him the best director award in Venice.

In 2002, Lee was appointed minister of culture and tourism, which certainly got in the way of making movies. He resigned two years later and founded his own production house.

The movie was made on location in Miryang, a medium-size town far from Seoul, “an ordinary city, we just know that it’s a rough imitation of a big city,” the director said. The city, and the film’s Korean title, “Milyang,” where the action is set, means “a place with good sunshine,” he added. “But we have expanded it to make it secret sunshine.”

Lee shot in CinemaScope for the first time. “Most suspense movies aren’t made in CinemaScope,” he said, “but I thought it would be a good way to show the little things, the details in our daily life. I felt that CinemaScope could be a way of telling this story which is not just about what you see, but also touches on what is hidden. I tried to compose the scenes in such a way that you are not aware of the composition, only fluidity.”

We are not so much in a state of suspense, as stunned by each turn of the story. “I think that audiences today know everything, so my goal is to do something unpredictable, to show them something they don’t expect,” he added.

This is a movie that you can look at for the actors, but they are so good that they melt into the story. Jeon Do-Yeon stars as the frail heroine, and Song Kang-Ho, the popular lead of “The Host,” is her mysterious well-wisher. Both are stars in Korea.

Song, who made his film debut in Lee’s “Green Fish” as a gangster, uses his talent in a completely different way here. He behaves like a secondary character, a figure of fun because of his girth and clumsy ways.

“But if you watch closely, he is the focus of the film,” the director said. “And, in a way, the storyteller. His eye is always on her, but she keeps looking up at the sky. And when she walks, she can only go in one direction, straight ahead, she can’t look back. He has to follow her from a distance – if she looked behind her, she would see him.”

Romance is not on her mind, not when she first comes to town, and certainly not after the drama that befalls her.

“But my focus is not on the drama, but on what happens after,” Lee said. “All kidnapping cases have the same motivation and violence. It is the cruelest, most painful thing. I thought about making this film for a long time.”

There are evangelistic forces in Miryang and they get to work on the bereft woman. In no time, she is converted – but that is not the end of the story. In a densely written script, stories keep blossoming: some are unbearably sad, others funny.

“You see many crosses against the skyline of Korean cities,” the director said. “There are many religions and sects. My family has a Confucian tradition so I had no religion, but my wife’s family was Protestant, and I taught in a Protestant school.”

Lee says that things that happened in his own life made him feel close to this story. “The woman’s great despair touched me. She is in such pain, but in the end, she finds something inside herself.

“I think we keep living with faith because we need it. Even atheists believe in something – in something else. Yet, I didn’t want to make a movie about faith, really, but a reflection on what goes on inside us. Cinema is a great tool, a way to talk about the invisible through the visible.”

She also meets a car mechanic – a lumbering awkward man – who trails her, faithful-dog style.

But things are not as they seem and her life takes a tragic turn.

“Secret Sunshine” is mysterious and terrifying. At times, it feels like a thriller, with surprising twists, but it has a hidden core. It is a story of faith, how it can enter a life, and how it can vanish.