MoMA PRESENTS FIRST COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE OF THE FILMS OF KIM KI-DUK

Celebrated Korean Director Will Introduce Opening Night Screening of Latest Feature Breath

KIM KI-DUK April 23–May 8, 2008 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

Press screening of Soom (Breath), Thursday, April 17, 10:00 a.m.

NEW YORK, April 9, 2008—The Museum of Modern Art presents the first complete North American retrospective of Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk. Kim Ki-Duk, a 14-film exhibition that includes several features never before seen in the U.S., is presented April 23 through May 8, 2008 in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, giving audiences a rare chance to chart the development of the director's sensuous imagery and strong narratives. Kim will be present on opening night, April 23, to introduce a screening of his latest feature Soom (Breath, 2007). The exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Hahn Dong-Sin, founder of the Korean cultural organization Open Work, New York. Kim Ki-Duk (b. 1960, Bonghwa), a self-taught maverick Korean filmmaker, has been a factory worker, soldier, priest-in-training, and, between 1992 and 1995, a street artist in France, where he discovered cinema through the films of Leos Carax and Jonathan Demme. After winning a screenwriting competition in Korea, Kim was able to make, without any formal training, his first feature, Crocodile (1996). Over the next 11 years, 13 more films followed, including his best- known film, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003). Kim’s films cohere into a vivid and compelling body of work characterized by sweeping camera movements and long, thoughtfully composed shots. They are populated by characters, uneasy in their social situations, who adopt silence as a protection and whose reactions tend to be brutal; this savagery distinguishes these narratives. His stories are often set on islands or in worlds circumscribed by water, as in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Hwal (The Bow, 2005), and Seom (The Isle, 2000), but Kim’s keen eye situates his films in a space that is remarkably vivid and cinematic. Presented in collaboration with the Korean Cultural Service (Song Soo-Keun, Director), New York, and with the support of the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Korean Film Council (An Cheong-Sook, Chair), and Korean Film Archive (Cho Sunhee, Director) in Seoul. The Department of Film is grateful to the Korean producers (Cineclick Asia, Prime Entertainment, Dauri Entertainment) and the American distributors (Tartan Films, Sony Pictures Classics, Lifesize, Empire Pictures) for the loan of prints for this retrospective.

For downloadable high-resolution images, please register at www.moma.org/press ********************************************************************************************************

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE FOLLOWING PRESS SCREENING IN THE ROY AND NIUTA TITUS 1 THEATER:

Thursday, 17 April

10:00 a.m. Soom (Breath). 2007. 84 min.

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No. 40 Press Contact: Paul Power, (212) 708-9847, or [email protected]

For downloadable images, please visit www.moma.org/press and register for user name and password.

Public Information: The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019

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The public may call (212) 708-9400 for detailed Museum information. Visit us at www.moma.org

KIM KI-DUK

SCREENING SCHEDULE

Wednesday, April 23

7:00 Soom (Breath). 2007. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Chen Chang, Jung-woo Ha, Kim Ki-Duk, Ji-a Park Kim. Kim’s most recent excursion into hyperrealism follows an attractive young sculptor living on the outskirts of Seoul with her beloved daughter and a husband from whom she is alienated. Upon seeing a television news broadcast about a death row inmate’s suicide attempt, she begins visiting the prisoner in jail. Each season, she redecorates the prison visiting room, talks about herself, sings, and even dances for the prisoner—yet he remains stoically silent. Kim produces a transcendent film from this seemingly bizarre narrative. 84 min. Kim Ki-Duk present

Thursday, April 24

6:15 Bin-jip (3-Iron). 2004. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Seung-yeon Lee, Hyun-kyoon Lee, Hyun-ho Kwon, Jeong-ho Choi, Ju-seok Lee, Mi-suk Lee, Sung-hyuk Moon, Jee-ah Park, Jae-yong Jang, Dah-hae Lee. Many of Kim’s films are divided into parts, and in 3-Iron the divisions are especially telling. A young man enters people’s vacant homes—treating them with great respect and care— only to sneak away when the owners return. The first part of the film concerns his discovery and capture; the second section takes place in prison, where he practices the art of disappearing; and the third is about being present without being seen. 90 min.

8:15 Samaria (Samaritan Girl). 2004. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Yeo-reum Han, Ji-min Kwak, Eol Lee, Kwon Hyun-Min, Oh Young, Gyun-Ho Im. This three-act melodrama begins with two carefree women, one a prostitute raising money for a European trip and the other her manager. When the former dies, her manager vows to return all of their profits to the clients—but only after sleeping with each of them. Meanwhile her father, a retired policeman, awaits her confession. The acts are titled “Vasumitra” (the name of a legendary prostitute who turned clients toward Buddhism), “Samaria" (after “Santa Maria” and “samaritan”), and “Sonata.” 95 min.

Friday, April 25

6:15 Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring). 2003. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Yeong-su Oh, Kim Ki-Duk, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo, Yeo-jin Ha, Jong-ho Kim, Jung-young Kim, Dae-han Ji. This film, Kim’s best known in America, is set in a small Buddhist temple in the middle of a secluded and ravishingly beautiful lake. There live an old monk and his young charge, a boy barely of school age who learns the secrets and lessons of the world around him. As the seasons change, the boy matures into adolescence and adulthood. The film never leaves the floating monastery and its breathtaking vistas, yet its seemingly hermetic world is a window onto life’s mysteries. 103 min.

8:30 Hwal (The Bow). 2005. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Yeo-reum Han, Si-jeok Seo, Good-hwan Jeon, Seon-hwang Jeon, Seok-hyeon Jo. Lyrical, dreamy, and shot through with hues of cerulean blue, The Bow is the most rhythmic of Kim’s films. Set upon the water, the film takes place on a boat rented out to day fishermen. The crew consists of Old Man and his sixteen-year-old ward, whom he plans to marry on her seventeenth birthday. The title refers to the fiddle-like musical instrument that Old Man plays—and that he uses as a weapon against clients who become too interested in his intended. Strangely, the bow is also used to tell fortunes. 90 min.

Saturday, April 26

2:00 Hwal (The Bow). See Friday, April 25, 8:30

4:00 Paran daemun (Birdcage Inn). 1998. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Ji-eun Lee, Hae- eun Lee, Jae-mo Ahn, Hyeong-gi Jeong, Min-seok Son. Birdcage Inn, Kim’s third film, was his first to garner international critical acclaim. Egon Schiele’s portraits of nude prostitutes were a major influence on the filmmaker, and he begins Birdcage Inn with the arrival of a young prostitute in a coastal town with one of these portraits under her arm. She soon takes up residence in a down-at-heel guesthouse, the Birdcage Inn, where the family who runs the establishment continually interferes with her life and trade. 105 min.

6:15 Soom (Breath). See Wednesday, April 23, 7:00.

8:00 Seom (The Isle). 2000. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Jung Suh, Yoosuk Kim, Sung- hee Park, Jae-hyeon Jo, Hang-Seon Jang. Deliriously scenic, The Isle is also one of the most unsettling of Kim Ki-Duk’s chamber dramas, marked by the sharp contrast between the idyllic landscape and the sadomasochistic relationship of its two main characters. On a secluded lake where men fish from anchored rafts, a mute young woman sells bait, food, and herself. On one of these rafts the woman spies an attractive fugitive. When he is at his most vulnerable, she—in a sense—hooks him. The Isle is not for the squeamish. 90 min.

Sunday, April 27

2:00 Bin-jip (3-Iron). See Thursday, April 24, 6:15.

4:30 Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring). See Friday, April 25, 6:15

Monday, April 28

6:00 Suchwiin bulmyeong (Address Unknown). 2001. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Dong-kun Yang, Min-jung Ban, Young-min Kim, Eun-jin Bang, Gye-nam Myeong. One of Kim’s more hot-blooded and extravagantly brutal melodramas imagines a village, Pyongtaek, in the 1970s, where commerce is intricately bound to an American army base. A mother and son live in an abandoned bus, where she writes to the boy’s father, a black G.I., only to have the letters returned marked “address unknown.” Her lover is a man who butchers dogs, and her son is his reluctant assistant; the son’s acquaintances include a young girl blind in one eye, the girl’s beloved pet dog, and a very shy boy. Communication takes place mainly through violent action. 117 min.

Wednesday, April 30

4:30 Seom (The Isle). See Saturday, April 26, 8:00

Thursday, May 1

6:15 Shi gan (Time). 2006. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Jung-woo Ha, Ji-Yeon Park, Ji- heon Kim, Sung-min Kim, Yeong-hwa Seo, Hyeon-a Seong. Plastic surgery seems to be an obsession in Korea, where it is estimated that about half of women in their twenties have their appearances surgically altered. In Kim's penultimate film he imagines a young woman who feels her lover is bored with her "same old face." One day, having made a secret contract with a respected doctor to change her face into something not necessarily "pretty," she disappears from her companion's life, only to reappear later as someone else. Yet her reaction to his surprise is, in itself, surprising. 97 min.

8:30 Hae an seon (The Coast Guard). 2002. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Dong-Kun Jung, Jeong-hak Kim, Ji-a Park, Hye-jin Yu, Jin Jeong, Gu-taek Kim. The director translates his experiences as a Korean marine into a tense melodrama about a young guard, Kang Han-Cheol, who takes his rough training too much to heart. Anyone entering the South Korean coast after dark is considered an enemy, but when Kang shoots a couple making love on a beach in the demilitarized zone between South and North, he must wrestle the consequences-which vary between the military, who consider him a hero, and the villagers who consider him a murderer. 91 min.

Friday, May 2

6:15 Samaria (Samaritan Girl). See Thursday, April 24, 8:15

8:30 Nabbeun namja (Bad Guy). 2001. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Jae-hyeon Jo, Won Seo, Yun-tae Kim, Duek-mun Choi, Yoon-young Choi. Bad Guy was enormously successful in Korea, where the majority of its audience was made up of young women. The film's opening scene has already become a classic of sorts. In a busy park a young woman is speaking with her boyfriend when a man suddenly appears and forcibly kisses the girl. He keeps his mouth locked to hers until a group of soldiers separate them, and she spits in his face. And yet, although his throat is scarred and he does not speak, he has made a claim, and she accedes. In Kim Ki- Duk's world, extremes collide, but rather than shattering apart, a kind of absorption occurs. 100 min.

Saturday, May 3

1:30 Yasaeng dongmul bohoguyeog (Wild Animals). 1997. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Jae-hyeon Jo, Dong-jik Jang, Ryun Jang, Sasha Rucavina, Richard Bohringer, Denis Lavant, Laurent Buro. Kim came to know and love cinema in his early thirties, during the three years he was in France selling his sidewalk paintings. Wild Animals, his second film, is a kind of Korean homage to the energy and themes of the French New Wave, American gangster films, and even the work of Camille Claudel. On the outskirts of Paris, a pair of petty criminal Korean refugees gets mixed up with major French mobsters-and the mobsters’ Korean girlfriends. 105 min.

3:45 Shilje sanghwang (Real Fiction). 2000. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Jin-mo Jut, Jin-ah Kim, Min-seok Son, Je-rak Lee, Ki-yeon Kim, Sun-mi Myeong. In terms of form, Real Fiction is Kim’s most experimental work. As Derek Elley explained in Variety, “Kim and his 11 associate directors on different locations shot in real time—a three-hour, 20-minute period one day in Seoul—using ten 35mm cameras and ten digicameras, but the finished film is edited down to eighty-six minutes.” The narrative concerns an artist who goes on a killing spree, and the film ends with the entire crew celebrating the making of the film. 95 min.

6:00 Ag-o (Crocodile). 1996. Screenplay by Kim Ki-Duk. With Jae-hyeon Jo, Jae-hong Ahn. Kim’s debut film, long out of circulation, heralded a furious young self-taught talent with a vision that, brutal though it is, is grounded in redemption. Crocodile anticipates his future work in its portrayal of anger, its overloaded violence, its contrast between innocence (childhood) and experience (maturity), and its feral battle of the sexes. Crocodile, who scavenges by diving into a polluted river, lives on its banks with a young boy and older man. His simple life is complicated one day when a woman attempts suicide. 102 min.

8:15 Shi gan (Time). See Thursday, May 1, 6:15.

Sunday, May 4

1:00 Nabbeun namja (Bad Guy). See Friday, May 2, 8:30.

3:00 Hae an seon (The Coast Guard). See Thursday, May 1, 8:30.

5:00 Paran daemun (Birdcage Inn). See Saturday, April 26, 4:00.

Wednesday, May 7

6:15 Shilje sanghwang (Real Fiction). See Saturday, May 3, 4:15.

8:30 Ag-o (Crocodile). See Saturday, May 3, 6:00

Thursday, May 8

6:15 Yasaeng dongmul bohoguyeog (Wild Animals). See Saturday, May 3, 2:00.

8:30 Suchwiin bulmyeong (Address Unknown). See Monday, April 28, 6:00.