JANUARY 7-11

A RETROSPECTIVE OF FEATURE FILMS BY THE ACCLAIMED FILMMAKER JEON SOON-IL, ONE OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH KOREAN CINEMA’S LEADING INDEPENDENT DIRECTORS.

This exhibition, organized by Cine-Asie in Montreal, introduces the unique cinema of the South Korean writer-director-producer Jeon Soo-Il, an artist whose career exemplifies the term independent filmmaker. Jeon is a contemporary of the reigning generation of filmmakers — Kim Ki-Duk, Park Chan-Wook, Bong Joon-Ho, Lee Chan-Dong, Hong Sang-Soo and others —that has brought international renown to South Korean cinema. Jeon, however, has worked largely outside the Seoul-centred film industry that has been the incubator for South Korea’s remarkable film renaissance.

Born in Sokcho, Kangwon province, in 1959, Jeon was educated in Pusan (also known as Busan) Korean’ s second largest city, and in France. He has remained loyal to his regional roots, with Kangwon and Pusan locales providing the settings for several of his films. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at Kyungsung University in Pusan. Jeon’s distinctive cinema is lyrical, observational, deliberately paced, and beautifully shot and composed, with a strong sense of landscape and space. Atmospheric and melancholic, it treats themes of time, memory, mortality, identity, and rootlessness. His films frequently centre on journeys, both interior and exterior, undertaken by emotionally disconnected protagonists, by modern people missing a sense of purpose or place. This sometimes has an apparent autobiographical element: in two of the features screening here, the wanderer of the tale is a filmmaker with personal and/or professional woes. Jeon’s concerns and methods have affinities with European art cinema of the 1960s.

Jeon’s award-winning work has been widely screened at festivals around the world and critically lauded in Europe, but remains little-known in North America. None of the films in this program have screened theatrically in Vancouver before.

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Acknowledgments: The North American tour of the films of Jeon Soo-Il was organized by Cine-Asie. Support was provided by the Government of the Republic of Korea and its agencies. This Vancouver presentation is a collaboration of Pacific Cinémathèque and Cine-Asie. Cine-Asie is a Montreal-based non-profit media arts organization whose role is to bridge the cultural divide between Asia and Canada. For more information see www.cineasie.ca.

Presented by Cine-Asie in collaboration with Pacific Cinémathèque 
With support of the Korean Culture and Information Service and Dongnyuk Film