Secret Sunshine
A widow moves with her young son to her late husband's hometown to start over, but when the boy is abducted and killed she is thrown into unbearable grief.
Cannes Film Festival, Best Actress (Jeon Do-yeon), 2007
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.
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
- 2007
- South Korea
- Korean
- Film