POETRY

Mija is in her mid-sixties, lives in a small town on the Han river, is raising her grandson and earns a little extra by caring for a partly paralysed old man. At the doctor’s she learns that she has Alzheimer’s disease; the first words are already failing her. At the same time she enrols in a poetry course at the cultural centre to write a poem, just once in her life. Then she learns that her grandson belongs to a group of schoolboys who raped a classmate for months until the girl took her own life – and the boys’ fathers want to settle the matter with money. “Poetry” (original title “Shi”) by Lee Chang-dong, South Korea 2010, places its heroine between these two tasks.

Lee Chang-dong asks whether poetry is possible in the face of such guilt, and gives the answer of a woman who looks closely. Yoon Jeong-hee, a star of Korean cinema of earlier decades, returned to the screen for the role after sixteen years and won, among other awards, the Asia Pacific Screen Award for it. In competition at Cannes in 2010 it won the award for best screenplay. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2011.

Shown at the 2011 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2011 · Film Archive