Lee Chang-dong

Abstract

Lee Chang-dong, born in 1954 in Daegu, South Korea, came to the cinema after a career writing fiction, wanting to reach a large audience with his work and believing this was no longer possible using the written word. He began by working on two scripts for Korean New Wave director Park Kwang-su: Geu seome gago shibda (To the Starry Island) (1993) and Jeon Tae-il (A Single Spark) (1995). Soon, he would go on to make his first film as a writer-director, Chorok Mulgogi (Green Fish) (1997), part of a whole cohort of filmmakers (Hong Sang-soo, Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho) who would remake the Korean film industry over the upcoming decades. Lee’s work is both distinctive among his Korean contemporaries, tending more toward realism in style even as he deals with the melodramatic plots required of mainstream cinema, while being more continuous with western art cinema humanism than cultish genre directors like Park and Bong or more minimalist stylists like Hong. His next film, Bakha Satang (Peppermint Candy) (1999), would establish Lee as an important voice, and although he would work slowly over the next coming decades, each new Lee film would mark an important event both in Korean cinema and, increasingly, in the global market as well. It was also at this time that western scholarly interest in Korean film begins to widely expand, and Lee’s movies were often an important touchstone for this work. In 2002, he released Oasis (2002), which competed at the Venice Film Festival, and then he made another change in his career direction, becoming the Minister of Culture and Tourism under the left-wing government of Roh Moo-hyun from 2003 to 2004. He returned to filmmaking in 2007 with his first literary adaptation, Milyang (Secret Sunshine), which won a Best Actress award for Jeon Do-yeon at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, Shi (Poetry), was almost universally acclaimed and won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, but then Lee took another sustained break from directing, although he did help produce some important films, such as July Jang’s Dohee-ya (A Girl at My Door) (2012) and Yoon Ga-eun’s Woori-deul (The World of Us) (2016). In 2018, he returned with his most unusual film to date, Burning, a (relatively) big-budget adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami. It won the International Critics Prize at Cannes and re-established Lee as one of the modern cinema’s master filmmakers.