Renowned Korean filmmaker Lee Chang Dong, the director of Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, and Oasis, returns to the director's chair in 2007 with the critically acclaimed Secret Sunshine. This is his fourth film, and his first directorial work since his stint as Minister of Culture and Tourism from 2003 to 2004. In addition to Lee's long-awaited return, Secret Sunshine attracted much attention with its pairing of two of the biggest names in Korean cinema - Song Kang Ho and Jeon Do Yeon, who was named Best Actress at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for her amazing performance.

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Although religious faith only plays a part in Lee Chang-dong’s new film—his first after a tenure as South Korean Minister of Culture after making 2002’s excellent Oasis—one has to be impressed by the way he and actress Jeon Do-yeon approach one of the hardest possible things to express in cinema—conversion. They do it not through some remarkable conceit or technical expression, but rather they provide perhaps the most vital of all interpretive aspects—context. Secret Sunshine, one might say, is a study of that context, a study of denial. It builds innocuously enough, with widowed mother Shin-ae (Jeon) moving with her young son Jun (Seon Jeong-yeob) from Seoul to Miyang, his father’s hometown whose name in Chinese translates to the film’s title. The reason for the move, like the games the mother and son play that verge on casually masochistic—Jun plays dead and pretends to have gone missing—are quietly disconcerting, all hinting with that wonderful kind of overt subtlety found in melodramas at the possibly unhealthy way Shin-ae and her boy are coping with—or masking over—tremendous grief and loss. These hints are superbly communicated naturalistically in little things and small mannerisms, unfolding at a gradual, leisurely pace as the family settles into the small town, the mother both irritating some of the locals as well as making new friends, and generally keeping both the town and the audience guessing as to who Shin-ae really is behind the veneer of her family’s new life.
 

Excerpt from www.d-kaz.com