Arirang

Kim Ki-duk returns with his award winning film Arirang, the first film he has made in three years.  Kim was quite a prolific filmmaker from South Korea until a tragic event occured on the set of his 2008 film Dream, in which an actor nearly died whilst filming an attempted suicide.  The near death experience of that actor, coupled with the responsibility Kim felt towards the actor, led to a creative breakdown of the director married with a crippling writer's block.

Kim attempts to use the power of film to harness his creative juices again, by looking back upon his career whilst in his self-imposed exile and solitude.

Kim was born in 1960 and studied art in Paris before returning to Korea to begin his career as a screenwriter, he made his directorial debut with Crocodile in 1996.  Since then he has been lauded by critics and developed a following on the art house circuit thanks to films such as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004).

Whilst the documentary form is manipulated into a form of confessional and Alan Bennett-esque talking head format as Kim Ki-duk talks to himself, the product nevertheless serves as a great document about the commitment and focus auteurs have; it may resemble much of a rambling man yearning for calmer days when he had more freedom and less responsibility, yet sometimes a tragedy has to befall you for you to find an answer to yourself.

The film may not be as beautiful as some of his fictional work, and this is harsh to the extreme of showing us a person who is fraught with self-doubt; yet we cannot deny the extent to which the director chooses to show us himself in this naked and honest persona as he battles his inner demons.

Critics may say that such self-indulgent filmmaking should be reserved for biographys and not grace the silver screen; yet we should be thankful that such a strong Korean cinematic voice as his - along with compartriots Park Chan-wok, Oldboy and Bong Joon-ho, The Host and Mother - that was nearly lost has at least chosen to get behind a camera (and in front of it) again, however slowly it may appear, he deserves not to be rushed.

Arirang is released on Friday 8th June by Terracota Distribution and is on limited release appearing at the ICA in London for a week run - www.ica.org.uk

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Poetry

Lee Chang-Dong is hardly the first filmmaker to send a protagonist on a journey of discovery that changes their perception of the world, but no one’s ever put a sixtysomething granny in the early stages of Alzheimer’s through an adult-education poetry class as a way of crafting a social statement about a self-absorbed patriarchy’s paucity of human insight.

We watch and learn – about South Korea certainly, but about ourselves too – though this never becomes a duty, since Lee’s is a filmmaker with a conscience, who deploys it in an astringent challenge to our assumptions rather than sentimental pandering.

Lee is esteemed at home and on the festival circuit (he’s a regular in competition at Cannes), but this is the first of his five features to secure UK theatrical distribution. It’s fair to say that the subject-matter, encompassing poetry, dementia, sexual abuse and suicide, is likely to be a hard sell, but the quality of the film is such that it simply demands an airing.

Here the elderly Mija reacts to news of her irreversible Alzheimer’s by signing up for a poetry class,so  why even enter an arena that’s about shaping enhanced perceptions through the skilled command of language? In essence, that’s the puzzle which drives the story forward, as the viewer tries to make connections between poetry and the unfolding dilemma whereby the old lady is happens upon some blood money, and the other narrative string involving a rape.

Leading lady Yun Jung-Hee, a Korean screen legend who emerged from 16 years of retirement to provide the latest in a series of truly remarkable female performances in Lee’s filmography, proves uncannily adept at showing how Mija’s meek exterior hides a stern interior that can challenge the male dominated environment she comes upon.

The film is a companion to Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother (where the social observation stems from the matriarch’s determination to deny her slow-witted son’s guilt in a murder case), whereas that story took on the conventions of a crime thriller and procedural detective genre, here Lee is more of a naturalistic director who makes you think you have stumbled upon a real life conversation.

The results are powerful, and not just in the way we come to sense how Mija’s misadventures with the local poetry group that is frequently hijacked by men egotistically parading their would-be sensitivity – effectively dovetail with the rape storyline by highlighting the male sense of entitlement seemingly running through every layer of Korean society.

Lee proves himself to be an astute and delicate filmmaker who is able to make a film that is both beguiling and yet politically conscious of sexual politics in a very restrained nation.  The film was lauded at Cannes in 2010 and fully deserves this wide release on DVD.

Poetry is released on DVD by Rabbit Publicity on Monday 28th November, who I thank for the check disc.