Poetry
An ageing grandmother beginning to lose her memory enrols in a poetry class just as she learns her grandson took part in a schoolgirl's death.
Cannes Film Festival, Best Screenplay, 2010
Poetry follows Mija, a genteel woman in her sixties who cares for her sullen grandson and works part time as a carer. As she signs up for a poetry class and struggles to write her first poem, she receives an early diagnosis of Alzheimer's and discovers that her grandson was among the boys responsible for a girl's suicide. The film follows her through the collision of these burdens.
It braids memory loss, guilt, and moral awakening into a single quiet reckoning, as the search for a poem becomes the search for how to see, and answer for, what has happened. It is a study of conscience forming even as the mind that holds it begins to fail. It won Best Screenplay at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
Director
Lee Chang-dong
Lee Chang-dong is a South Korean film director, screenwriter, and novelist who served as the country's Minister of Culture and Tourism. His films attend closely to grief, class and resentment, and the pull of obsession, often leaving motive and meaning unresolved. Secret Sunshine traces a mother's mourning; Poetry follows an aging woman facing memory loss and moral reckoning. Burning, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2018, studies longing, ambiguity, and quiet class rage.
Details
- 2010
- South Korea
- Korean
- Film