Programmed March 2025

Directed by Lee Chang-dong

A writer turned director whose literary background lends his films their novelistic weight, South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong has made some of the most searching and emotionally devastating works in contemporary cinema. Suffused with all the beauty, pain, and tension of real life, his films look closely at ordinary people pushed to emotional extremes as they grapple with tragedy and trauma: a widow wrestling with existential grief in Secret Sunshine ; an elderly woman confronting both the onset of Alzheimer’s and the fallout of a disturbing crime in Poetry ; and a young man consumed by jealousy and suspicion in Burning . Through these profoundly human characters, Lee contemplates the greatest question of all: what is the meaning of life in an often senseless world?