Films of Jeon Soo-il

WIND ECHOING IN MY BEING (1997)

Best Korean Film Award of ‘Wide Angle’ section in Pusan International Film Festival 1996. Official selection at the International Film Festival in Cannes (1997), New-Delhi (1998), Fribourg (1998) and Montreal (1998)

In this portrait of an artist as a young man, a loner living in an attic records his dreams of strange places and childhood memories in a book he hopes to publish one day. But visiting his old hometown and seeing the changes causes him to question whether recording his memories is worthwhile after all.

source: www.si.edu

THE BIRD WHO STOPS IN THE AIR (1999)

In competition at Venice International Film Festival 1999. Best Korean Film Award at Pusan International Film Festival 1999. Le Regard d’Or at Fribourg International Film Festival 2000. Screened at the International Film Festival of Moscow (2000) and Karlovy Vary (2001).

Kim (Sol Kyung-Gu) is a filmmaker and film professor at a regional university (Jeon is himself a film professor at Kyungsung University). He is not liked by his bored students, who are less interested in art and theory than in pursuing careers in the commercial film industry, and his relationship with his girlfriend, Young-Hie (Kim So-Hee), also an academic, is similarly less than satisfactory; her efforts to spark his interest in their future together prove futile. Preoccupied by his current filmmaking project — a documentary about birds, inspired by this memories and dreams, and by his yearning to fly — Kim doesn’t notice that his professional and personal lives are falling apart. Despite his increasing estrangement from everyone, he agrees to accompany Young-Hie on a trip to her home village…

source: www.cinematheque.bc.ca

MY RIGHT TO RAVAGE MYSELF (2003)

Screened at the International Film Festival in Pusan (2003), Fribourg  (2004) and Manheim (2004).

When his barmaid girlfriend kills herself, a cab driver’s suspicions fall on a mysterious writer known only as S, who runs a sinister suicide-promoting suicide. Perhaps under his spell as well, a female performance artist plans the most extreme work of her life. Set in the milieu of barflies, punk rockers, artists and other denizens of the night, this film is a dark, daring examination of suicide as artistic expression. Intended for mature audiences.

source: www.si.edu

Click here to see the trailer.

TIME BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF (2005)

Screened at the International Film Festival in Pusan (2005), Pesaro (2006), Nantes (2006) and Brisbane (2006).

Titled after a French phrase denoting a time of darkness so thorough that one cannot make out any detail in front of one’s eyes, and set in an eerie, snowbound landscape, this film effectively conveys the uncanny feeling of being lost amid once familiar surroundings. After leading a bleak, financially difficult urban existence, a filmmaker returns to his hometown after a twenty-five year absence, where he meets a woman in search of her lost sibling. In their mutual wanderings and loss, they develop an intense and mysterious attraction to each other.

source: www.si.edu

WITH A GIRL OF BLACK SOIL (2007)

Awarded at the International Festival in Teheran (2009, Grand Prix), in Deauville (2008, International Critic Award), in Venice (2007, CICAE Award and Lina Mangicapri Award), in Pusan (2008, Best Korean Film), in Fribourg (2008, FIFRESI Award and International Cine-Club Award), in Las Palmas (2008, Public Award) and in Barcelona (2008, “Golden durian”).

In a small mining village in the Kangwon Province, a 9-year-old girl Young-lim lives a financially limited but cozy life with her miner father, and her mentally challenged brother. But their happiness is interrupted as her father loses his job after a mining incident. Jeon’s most acclaimed film is a “quiet wonder” (Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter) that effectively plunges the viewer into its rugged, forlorn setting and the interior world of its young heroine.

source: www.si.edu

Click here to see an extract of the film.
HIMALAYA (2008)

The film was screened at the International Film Festival in Karlovi Vary (2009) and Pusan (2008).

While visiting his brother’s factory, recently-divorced Choi (“Oldboy” star Choi Min-sik) agrees on the spur of the moment to travel to Nepal to deliver the ashes of a deceased worker to his homeland. After meeting the worker’s impoverished family, he finds it equally difficult to break the news to them, and to return to his former life.  Jeon’s images of the landscape of the Himalayas are as powerful as the drama unfolding within them.

source: www.si.edu

Click here to see the trailer.