Secret Sunshine

Secret Sunshine follows Shin-ae, a piano teacher who relocates with her son to Miryang, the provincial town her dead husband came from, hoping for a fresh start. When her son is kidnapped and murdered, her carefully rebuilt life collapses. She turns to an evangelical church for relief, and the film traces the wrenching arc from that conversion to her fury when she confronts the question of forgiving the man who killed her child.

The film is a searching study of mourning, of the wish to hand grief to a higher power, and of the impossibility of forgiveness offered too soon or on someone else's terms. It observes how faith can both hold and fail a person in extremity, and how rage returns when consolation proves hollow. Jeon Do-yeon won Best Actress at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. It is based on the short story A Story of a Bug (Beolle Iyagi) by Lee Cheong-jun.