LEE CHANG-DONG

Biography

Lee Chang-dong was born in Daegu in 1954. His family boasted aristocratic ancestry, but it was a nobility that had long since declined. His sympathies for Lee's father's left also prevented him from finding stable work, so that the support of the family weighed entirely on his mother's shoulders. A situation that forced Lee to acquire a socio-political conscience from an early age.

At a very young age, Lee approached writing and theater, thanks to the influence of his older brother, active on the theater scenes of Daegu as an actor. For Lee, writing represents an escape from his difficult family situation and an ideal form of expression for his secret thoughts and desires. After graduating from Kyungpook University with a degree in Korean language teaching, Lee began teaching in a mountain village high school in 1980. At this time, he acquired his first notoriety in the literary environment by winning the prize of the newspaper Donga Ilbo with the novel Jeonni. He then moved to Seoul, where Sinil taught high school. He then published two other books of considerable critical success, Soji and Nokcheon.

Between the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, however, with the transition of Korean society from military dictatorship to democracy and the consequent dismissal of traditional ideologies that gave way to rampant capitalism and the relativism of post-modernism, Lee experienced a crisis of inspiration that led him to think about abandoning writing. It was at this moment that he approached cinema. Director Park Kwang-su, in fact, contacts him to work on the revision of the script of the film To the Starry Island (Keu Seom-e Gago Sipda, 1993), based on the novel by writer Im Cheol-u. By a series of coincidences, Lee also finds himself working as the first assistant director on Park's film and then does his directorial apprenticeship. Lee collaborated again with Park Kwang-su, writing the screenplay for the next A Single Spark (Jeon Tae-il, 1995), a biopic of trade unionist Jeon Tae-il who set himself on fire in the public square holding the Workers' Rights Declaration in his hand at the time of forced industrialization. The following year, Lee began production on his first film as a director, Green Fish (Chorok Mulgogi, 1997). Despite being a genre film, the film earned Lee substantial critical recognition and collected several awards at home (the Blue Dragon Award for Best Picture and Best Actor to Han Seok-gyu, who also won the Grand Bell Award) and abroad (the Dragons and Tigers Award in Vancouver).

His second film, Peppermint Candy (Bakha Satang, 1999), which traces twenty years of South Korean history, rewinding the skein of the life of a man who commits suicide by throwing himself under a train, is the first Korean film invited to open the Busan International Film Festival. A recognized masterpiece of new Korean cinema, Peppermint Candy is identified by many as the work of Lee's maturity; the film was invited to the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes and won the Grand Bell Award for best film of the year.

With the following Oasis (2002), a touching love story between two outcasts that unleashes a biting critique of the hypocrisies of the family institution, Lee Chang-dong makes a name for himself among all international critics. The film is, in fact, the most acclaimed and awarded in the competition of the 2002 Venice International Film Festival: among others, Lee receives the award for best director, the interpreter Moon So-ri the Mastroianni award and the film the international critics' award. The Venetian triumph brought Oasis, certainly not an easy or commercial film, also to a huge response from the public among Korean audiences. At the time, Lee supported Roh Moo-hyun's presidential campaign. Once elected, in 2003, Roh appointed Lee Minister of Culture and Tourism. This is the first time that a filmmaker has been called upon to carry out a ministerial position. A position that Lee, little inclined to compromises and the shackles of bureaucracy, left the following year, to return to devote himself to film creation. With his most recent film, Secret Sunshine (Miryang, 2007), presented in competition at Cannes 2007 and awarded there for the interpretation of Jeon Do-yeon, Lee has further consolidated his international reputation and has even collected three Asian Film Awards (pan-Asian award inspired by the European Film Awards): for Best Film, for Best Director and for Best Actress to Jeon Do-yeon. With only four films to his credit, Lee is nevertheless already considered one of the most important authors on the international film scene.

After 8 years in 2018 Lee Chang-dong returned behind the camera to direct "Burning", the film adaptation of the short story "Burning Granaries" by Haruki Murakami. Presented in competition at the 71st Cannes Film Festival, the film has achieved great success with critics and audiences, being distributed in more than 100 countries. "Burning" was also the winner of the "Festival Critics Award" at the 17th edition of the Florence Korea Film Fest.

Critique

When Lee Chang-dong made his directorial debut with Green Fish (Chorok Mulgogi, 1997), South Korea was going through a key moment in its recent history. A turning point fraught with consequences in the economic, social and cultural panorama of the country, which has also been forcefully inscribed in the fate of local cinema, leaving indelible traces both in the overall industrial structure and in the film texts themselves. 1997 was in fact the year of the great Asian crisis which, originating in Thailand, with its shock waves hit the Korean economy hard, marking its first great impasse since the seventies, a period of forced industrial development imposed by the dictator 'father' of modern South Korea, General Park Chung-hee. Within a few months, the Moody's agency downgraded the country's financial reliability from A1 to A3 first and then even to B1, while the Seoul government asked for a large loan from the International Monetary Fund; The national currency, the won, is devalued by more than 40% of its value.

In this climate of crisis connected to what most Koreans perceived as a great national humiliation, we can trace the seeds of a newfound national pride, as well as a fervent nationalist spirit that are among the primary causes of the rebirth of Korean cinema and that have influenced and have been rekindled by the development of the so-called new Korean cinema. It is not for nothing that when Kang Je-gyu's blockbuster Shiri was released in Korean theaters in 1999, the promotional campaign explicitly leveraged these sentiments, invoking support for the national industry against Hollywood; the result was a record taking, higher than that of Titanic.

At the same time, while the unstable but fluid industrial situation was seeing the increasing availability of new capital for film production (Samsung, for example, invested in Shiri), the Korean film scene was marked by the advent of a new generation of filmmakers. Within five years, filmmakers active before 1997 were supplanted (with the exception of the doyen Im Kwon-taek, who increasingly took on the emblematic - and problematic - profile and stature of 'national filmmaker') by the lever of thirty-year-olds, both in the commercial sphere (thanks to the mercantile prejudice according to which a closer age favored consonance of tastes with the public of twenty- and thirty-year-olds), as well as on the front of author's production.

A year before Lee, Hong Sang-so (The Day the Pig Fell into the Well, Dwaeji-ga Umul-e Bbajin-nal, 1996) and Kim Ki-duk (Crocodile, Ageo, 1996) made their feature debuts, a year later Im Sang-so (Girls' Night Out, Cheonyeodeul-eui Jeonyeok-shiksa, 1998), E J-yong (An Affair, Jeongsa, 1998) and Kim Jee-woon (The Quiet Family, Joyonghan Gajok), a little later Bong Joon-ho (Barking Dogs Never Bite, Peullandeoseu-eui Gae, 2000). All filmmakers in whose work an acute linguistic awareness is recognized and from which a complex relationship in terms of inspiration and reflection with respect to the Korean socio-cultural context can be deduced (see in this sense the manifestly dystopian accents of the first Kim Ki-duk). The debut of Lee, who after an experience as a teacher had dedicated himself to writing and had entered the world of cinema through a partnership with Park Kwang-su, a politically engaged filmmaker of the Korean new wave of the late eighties-early nineties, for whom he wrote the screenplays of To the Starry Island (Geu Seom-e Gago Shipda, 1993) and A Single Spark (Jeon Tae-il, 1995), however, stands out from the others. Korean critics see, in fact, in Green Fish - and in its accurate description of the social fabric against which the tragic novel of a young man who, just discharged from the draft, tries to climb the ladder in the world of organized crime, even weaving a flirtation with the boss's babe - stands out as a direct filiation with the 'social realism' of the Sixties, of the cinema of great Korean authors such as Yu Hyun-mok or Lee Man-hee.

An impression that many wanted to see reconfirmed in Lee's second feature film, Peppermint Candy (Bakha Satang, 1999) which, for a series of reasons, including symbolic, has been raised to an incunabulum of the reached maturity of the new Korean cinema. The first national film presented at the opening of the Busan International Film Festival (a festival born in 1996 that has accompanied and supported the development of new Korean cinema, becoming a showcase for it, and becoming the most important film event in Asia), Peppermint Candy was released in Korea on January 1, 2000 and its journey through the last twenty years in the life of a man, closely intertwined with the last twenty years of the history of the South Korean nation, has given it an almost testamentary value compared to the century that has just ended. Yet, on closer inspection, Peppermint Candy marks a clear break with Lee with respect to properly realistic ways of storytelling. The chapters of which Peppermint Candy is composed, in fact, are edited in reverse order with respect to the chronological occurrence of the events recalled: the first act of the film ends with the suicide of the protagonist, Yong-ho (unforgettable performance by Seol Kyeong-gu), who throws himself under a train, raising a cry: "I want to go back!". The cinematographic device fulfills, therefore, Yong-ho's last wish, taking the man and the viewer back in time, in a backwards path marked by connecting sequences that rewind the path along the tracks of a train - perhaps the very train that hit Yong-ho...

The idiosyncratic construction of the plot of Peppermint Candy unmasks Lee's witty awareness of the prerogatives and possibilities offered by the cinematic medium. In this sense, the passage behind the camera, for Lee, is not to be understood as a mere continuation of his activity as a writer, but as the exploration of a new language, endowed with a grammatical paradigm and different syntactic articulations. In Peppermint Candy, the narrative structure becomes a substantial vehicle of a metaphorical interpenetration between individual destiny and the history of a nation: the death, the descent into hell and even before that the loss of innocence of Yong-ho, a sort of ordinary man, Mr. Peppermint Candy. Red of South Korea at the end of the twentieth century, strongly call into question the financial crisis resulting from an unscrupulous rampant capitalism, the long, dark years of the military dictatorship and the repression of student protests and democratic movements, as well as the tragic massacre of Kwangju (May 1980). In the following Oasis, starring again the talented Seol Kyeong-gu and Moon So-ri, and winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice 2002, Lee staged the impossible love story between two marginals, a somewhat tardy man who has just served a sentence in prison for a crime actually committed by his brother and a paraplegic unable to speak and move normally, imprisoned in a squalid apartment by family members who benefit from her disability benefits. A work that has been intended as a merciless attack on the hypocrisies of the Korean family institution, but which opens up to surprising fantastic parentheses that give substance to the fantasies of 'normality' of lovers. Refractory to any melodramatic complacency, stubbornly inclined not to provide the viewer with footholds for easy emotion, Oasis certainly remains the most touching and sincere love story of recent Korean cinema.

In 2003, Lee accepted the appointment as Minister of Culture and Tourism in the government of President Roh Moo-hyun, becoming the first filmmaker to hold a ministerial position. A position that Lee, unwilling to compromise himself with fetters and byzantinisms of bureaucracy, in conjunction with a reshuffle of the executive, will leave the following year.

In his most recent effort, that Secret Sunshine (in the original, Miryang, the name of the city where the action is situated) which earned Jeon Do-yeon the Best Actress Award at Cannes 2007, Lee overturns the premises of Oasis and chooses not to show what cinema could show. Facing the theme of the invisible, the ineffable and the divine head-on, through the story of a woman who has lost her husband, loses her son, clings to faith and therefore loses the latter as well, Lee directs the viewer's gaze towards the off-screen of a sky to which defiant eyes are raised and points the camera at a ray of sunlight that illuminates a puddle to question a presence that does not give itself. Where in Oasis Lee gave his protagonists the comfort of daydreams that momentarily took over reality, in Secret Sunshine, he leaves his protagonist Shin-ae alone in front of an inscrutable God who does not manifest himself to her. A choice of absolute rigor that 'relaunches' the realist and even sociological component of the film. On this front, Lee prefers to downplay the relevance of the portrayal of the pervasive (and invasive) presence of Protestant churches in Korean society; nevertheless, Secret Sunshine offers a very interesting insight into a reality (too) little represented in Korean cinema.
Critical Presentation by Paolo Bertolin