Kim ki-duk / A masterful portrait of the seasons of a life

 

SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...AND SPRING

UN FILM BY KIM KI-DUK

A masterful portrait of the seasons of a life.""""

- Carla Meyer, San Francisco Chronicle

Kim Ki Duk, in this exquisitely simple movie, manages to isolate something essential about human nature and at the same time to comprehend the scope of human experience.""""

- A.O Scott, New York Times

As meditative and beautiful as its title would indicate.""""

- Kenneth Turan, Lost Angeles Times

SYNOPSIS

The exquisitely beautiful and very human drama Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is entirely set on and around a tree-lined lake where a tiny Buddhist monastery floats on a raft amidst a breath-taking landscape. The film is divided into five segments; each season representing a stage in a man’s life. Under the vigilant eyes of Old Monk, Child Monk learns a hard lesson about the nature of sorrow when some of his childish games turn cruel. In the intensity and lushness of summer, the monk, now a young man, experiences the power of lust, a desire that will ultimately lead him, as an adult, to dark deeds. With winter, strikingly set on the ice and snow-covered lake, the man atones for his past actions, and spring starts the cycle anew… With an extraordinary attention to visual details, such as using a different animal (dog, rooster, cat, snake) as a motif for each section, writer/director/editor KIM Ki-duk has crafted a totally original yet universal story about the human spirit.

DATE DE SORTIE

Langue originale: Korean
Genre: Drama, World Cinema
Durée: 103 min.
Année: 2003

METROPOLE

Movie director Kim Ki-duk dies of coronavirus

Movie director Kim Ki-duk (Yonhap)

Movie director Kim Ki-duk dies of coronavirus

By Shin Ji-hye and Im Eun-byel

December 12, 2020

South Korean movie director Kim Ki-duk died of complications from COVID-19 in Latvia on Friday. 

News reports from Russia said the director died in the hospital from complications associated with COVID-19.

Kim Ki Duk / 3 Iron

3 Iron

by Kim Ki Duk

Peter Bradshaw

15 July 2005 

What would Peter Alliss make of it? Kim Ki-duk is a director who has been able to combine, in a unique way, a facility for violence with a knack for reticent, even pastoral gentleness: a kind of Punk Buddhism.

3 Iron is an almost wordless movie which follows a burglar, Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon) who breaks in - not to steal but merely stay the night, take a bath, do some laundry. Then he finds a woman, Tae-suk (Lee Hyun-kyoon) who has been beaten up by her husband and without exchanging a word they fall ecstatically in love, and he exacts vengeance on the husband by whacking golf balls at him with the eponymous weapon.

The director shows how Sun-hwa is a corporeal ghost, floating through the lives of the prosperous and the not so prosperous, and Tae-suk passionately joins him in this secret state.

It is not as a good a movie as Kim's Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring, but still an engaging work by a very original film-maker.

THE GUARDIAN