Lee Chang-dong • South Korea • 2010 • Poetry brings transcendence in a woman’s twilight years
Mija lives in South Korea with her only grandson, Wook. Wook’s mother lives in another city, so Mija shares her small apartment and rather mundane life with the teenage boy, who is soon implicated alongside several schoolmates in a local tragedy. Mija receives tragic news of her own—she has early-stage Alzheimer's, a diagnosis she shares with no one. On a whim Mija attends a poetry course which radically changes her view of the world, as her mind slips slowly away from her.
With a quietly devastating performance by Yun Jung-hee, Poetry marvels in the beauty of ordinary existence as one woman's life enters its twilight. Lee Chang-dong’s fifth film premiered at San Sebastián, Karlovy Vary, Telluride, and Cannes, where it won Best Screenplay and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Poetry is a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
Aleksandr Sokurov • 2002 • Russia • A floating, single-take journey through Russian history.
Filmed in one 96-minute, continuous single-take shot—the first work of cinema to ever do so—Russian Ark foregrounds the ...
Nadav Lapid • France, Israel, Germany • 2019 • The challenges of putting down roots in a new place
Yoav is a disaffected young Israeli who has fled Tel Aviv to start a new life. Now in Paris, Yoav sees becoming Fre...
Andrei Ujică • Romania-Germany • 2010 • A glimpse inside the mind of a narcissistic leader.
On Christmas Day, 1989, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elsa, died by firing ...
