South Korea has selected Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine as its submission to the foreign language film category of the Academy Awards.

A special committee appointed by the Korean Film Council chose Secret Sunshine over Kim Ki-duk’s Breath and Kim Ji-hoon’s box office hit May 18.

Secret Sunshine premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won an actress award for Jeon Do-yeon as a young widow who moves from Seoul to start over in a provincial city. The film also stars Kang-ho Song.

South Korea has never had a film selected for inclusion in the final five nominations.

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Kim Rae Won’s Japanese movie wrapped the filming process
The movie title is Flower Shadow (Hanakake), and directed by Bayside Shakedown’s Gawai Hayato (If you’re into Jap movies, i truly recommend Bayside Shakesdown. It’s the special episode of series “Odoru Daisousassen”, starred Oda Yuuji as a detective, in the world of police beraucracy. Witty and refreshing). Hanakake will open next spring.

Oh, and remember Kim Rae Won’s new upcoming drama, Gourmet? Here’s an interview cut, English subbed.

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Upcoming Movies with trailers:

M, starring Kang Dong Won, Kong Hyo Jin, directed by Lee Mung Se, opens October 26th 2007, premieres at the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival.

Synopsis
A best seller writer Minwoo, suffering from constant deja vu goes into a somewhat imaginary relationship with a mysterious girl.
But the more he mets her, odd things start to occur and Minwoo is thrown into confusion.
Then strangely enough old memories about his first love, Mimi, start to come across his mind.
http://www.thecorestudio.net/

Trailer

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Love/Sarang, cast : Joo Jin Moo, Park Si Yeon, Kim Min Jun, directed by Gwak Gyeong Taek. Opens September 20th 2007 (so it’s supposed to be already out now in cinema)

Trailer :

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Court Lady (Gungnyeo), starring Park Jin Hee, Seo Yeong Hee, Lim Jeong Eun, opens 10-11-2007. It’s all about women, if we see the poster.

Synopsis
A maid-in-waiting hangs herself within the realms of the palace. But while performing an autopsy, palace medic Chunryung suspects murder and starts to investigate the case. With a sense of justice and full of wit, Chunryung bravely unmasks the deceptions, but soon confronts the veiled past, kept hidden by those that had far more power than she had expected.
http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/

Trailer:

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Happiness opens Oct 3rd 2007, cast :Hwang Jung Min, Im Soo Jung

Synopsis
Young-soo has enjoyed his life in Seoul before he finds himself suffering from cirrhosis.
Losing any desire to live, he decides to leave the city and go to a sanatorium in a country.
He meets in there a girl, Eun-hee who is also suffering from a critical disease. They
start to live together in an old house near the sanatorium. One day, his old girlfriend
appears in front of him, asking him to return to the life they once had before. He leaves
Eun-hee and restarts to live with his old girlfriend. But as time passes, he misses
Eun-hee, and goes down to the house they used to live together. But he finds the empty
house and Eun-hee who is waiting for her last moment in the sanatorium.

http://www.showbox.co.kr/

Trailer

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Full Credit When Posted Elsewhere
Compiled by Louise @ ShenYuePop.com
Source : Broasia, Kung Fu Cult Cinema, Variety Asia Online

Lee Chang-dong
Kim Young-jin, translated from Korean by Park Sanghee; Seoul Selection: 114
pp., 12,000 won

By Lee Hyo-won
Staff Reporter

Celebrated director and former Minister of Culture (2003-2004) Lee Chang-dong marked a milestone for Korean cinema when Jeon Do-yeon, the female lead of his fourth film “Secret Sunshine” (2007), was crowned Best Actress at the Festival de Cannes in May.

“Lee Chang-dong” (Kim Young-jin, translated from Korean by Park Sang-hee; Seoul Selection: 114 pp., 12,000 won) offers all you need to know about the 53-year-old filmmaker who became an icon with just four works under his belt. The book’s publication is most timely for quenching the growing curiosity of international audiences. Written by Kim Young-jin, one of the most active film critics in the country, it provides an intimate glimpse of Lee and insightful analyses of his three master works, “Green Fish” (1996), “Peppermint Candy” (1999) and “Oasis”(2002).

When the author met Lee for the fifth time for the book, the director was in the post-production process of “Secret Sunshine.” Kim could not see the film nor was he able to talk about it in detail because Lee “has an obsessive aversion to any premature predictions about his unfinished films.”

“Yet, I had a premonition that his new film would be a significant turning point in his career,” wrote Kim in the preface. “For now, I hope my premonition will turn out right.”

And it sure did. “Secret Sunshine” remapped Korea’s standing in the international cinematic scene.

“One thing is for sure __ his new film will show how he has evolved from a four-year hiatus that included a stint as the Minister of Culture and Tourism.”

The book introduces readers to Lee and his films through critical commentaries, a biography and extensive interviews with the director and comprehensive filmography and synopses for reference.

Readers will be able to view Lee from many different perspectives: a filmmaker wishing his works to speak for themselves (“If I could explain it in words, why make a film?” Kim quoted him as saying during a interview for “Peppermint Candy,” p. 67); a perfectionist novelist; a discreet Minister of Culture; and a man joking over a cup of coffee, calling himself “a bum pretending to be an artist” (p. 9).

“Lee” is the latest addition to the Korean Film Council’s “Korean Film Directors Series,” an ongoing project that aims to provide international audiences a thorough examination of the works of Korean film icons.

The series includes books on veteran director Im Kwon-taek and the award-winning Park Chan-wook.

hyowlee@koreatimes.co.kr

Lee, born in 1954, made a relatively late debut as a filmmaker in Korea. It was 1997 when he made his first feature-length film “Green Fish,” and critics and juries at home and abroad instantly noticed his knack for refined storytelling. “Green Fish,” offering a critical view of Korean society through the eyes of a young man, won the best film title at the Blue Dragon Awards in Korea, and then went on to grab awards at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Three years later, Lee came up with another moving tale, “Peppermint Candy,” and the reaction from moviegoers and critics was more enthusiastic. The film follows a single man in reverse chronology through 20 years of the country’s history, revealing Lee’s unique filmmaking techniques. In addition to several awards at international film festivals, “Peppermint Candy” received the best film title at the Grand Bell Awards, Korea’s most prestigious film award, propelling Lee into the top ranks of filmmakers here.

In many unfortunate cases, filmmakers who rise to instant fame tend to see their creative energy running out of steam a bit, but Lee was not an ordinary director. In 2002, Lee shook up Korean cinema again with his masterful work “Oasis,” a story involving a mentally ill man and a woman with cerebral palsy.

The film’s original storytelling brought Lee as many as 12 awards at home and abroad, including the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the Venice Film Festival that introduced talented Korean actress Moon So-ri to international audiences.

Then Lee decided to convert his creative energy into public office. Between 2003 and 2004, he served as minister of culture and tourism, the first filmmaker who was appointed to the highest position in the cultural sector.

Despite a hiatus in filmmaking career due to the tenure at the Culture Ministry, Lee has returned to the Korean cinema, this time offering a deeply gloomy yet insightful story about a woman struggling to restore her shattered life — only to see her hope crushed miserably.

It is indeed a positive development for the Korean film industry that a growing number of filmmakers have international recognition. But Lee expressed his concerns over the domestic movie industry confronting a slump at a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday.

“Currently many people in the film industry are striving to come up with solutions for the current crisis, and one of my concerns is that today’s young Korean filmmakers are reluctant to make audacious and experimental films,” he said. “Under the current distribution system, such films may not secure enough audiences, but still we should make bold and experimental movies, thereby infusing more energy into the sector.”

Essentially, director Lee did not like a fixed style, said actor Song Kang-ho at the news conference. “I worked with him about 10 years ago in ‘Green Fish’ and ‘Secret Sunshine’ is the second film I worked with him. Some actors find Lee’s style quite difficult because he does not specify what actors should do in detail. He does not push actors to move in a certain direction. Instead, he just encourages actors to feel the character themselves,” said Song, who played the owner of a car repair shop in “Secret Sunshine.”

Meanwhile, Lee is proving what he has preached about the importance of experimental films. “Secret Sunshine,” a serious film that tackles a not-so-mainstream subject, is estimated to have sold about 1 million tickets, thanks partly to its heroine receiving the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, released on May 23, is performing strong at box offices in competition with Hollywood blockbusters, demonstrating that a well-made experimental movie can infuse much-awaited energy into the Korean cinema.

By Yang Sung-jin

(insight@heraldm.com)

Source: The Korean Herald, 2007.06.04

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.