The Korean Cinema

A tiny Buddhist monastery floats on a raft amidst a breathtaking landscape, tended to by a solitary Monk. Into this serene setting comes a young child, who will become the Old Monk's protege...and so begins a lifelong journey of hope, despair, passion and redemption in a film hailed as A triumph of sheer cinematic craft, (Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald). From the brash actions of youth, through the dawn of adolescence and the fullness of adulthood, one man's life lessons are learned as seasons pass, his emotional inner life changing as the landscape around him. Award-winning Korean writer/director/editor Kim Ki-duk has crafted a lushly exotic, yet universal story about the human spirit and its evolution, from Innocence to Love, Evil to Enlightenment, and ultimately to Rebirth that Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News calls A beautifully composed canvas, the sort of film one falls into, resurfacing at the end with great reluctance.