Special Programs in Focus

• Korea
• 2002
• 91min

A Seashore Village is the one of Kim Soo-yong’s literary films, adapted from Oh Young-soo’s same titled short story. It lyrically describes lives of women living in untainted village by the sea. Sang-soo, a village hoodlum pursues...

Special Programs in Focus

• Taiwan
• 2002
• 114min

Ms. Chen is a typical Taipei working housewife. She has a rebellious teenaged daughter obsessed with a teacher, a philandering husband dallying with a neighbour and an allegedly senile mother-in-law who actually just craves some a...

Special Programs in Focus

• Taiwan
• 2002
• 106min

CMPC produced several blockbuster movies in the early 80s, and yet the box-office profit was poor. I proposed for four new directors to make a film, and I assured CMPC that it wouldn’t a big loss even if it failed. I asked Tao Dec...

Special Programs in Focus

• Japan
• 2002
• 117min

An intelligent young Korean man, known as ′R′, faces death by hanging for committing two sex-murders in Japan. But on the day of the execution, the hanging fails: R′s body refuses to die. The prison rule-books do not cover this ev...

Special Programs in Focus

• Korea
• 2002
• 91min

Based on the Maupassant’s short story first introduced as “First Love”, but now known as “The Return,” Return of a Man is Kim Soo-yong’s eighth film and his first adaptation. The film simultaneously presents the tragic love of Nam...

Special Programs in Focus

• Japan
• 2002
• 82min

An anarchic comedy in colour and ‘Scope about three students’ (the tallest one played by Kato Kazuhiko, founder/leader of the Sadistic Mika Band) who emerge from a swim in the sea to find that their clothes have been stolen from t...

Special Programs in Focus

• Taiwan
• 2002
• 93min

A postman tosses a letter to Watan, as the middle-aged Atayal man is still sound asleep with a hangover. The letter, about the discovery of his wallet buried in cement, falls on Watan’s face, just like the droppings of a bird. Wat...

Special Programs in Focus

• Taiwan
• 2002
• 80min

This Taiwanese drama provides a metaphor for life and politics on the island. Life at a military outpost is deadly dull. To entertain themselves the officers order enlisted men to shoot beer cans off their heads. Private Yisan, fo...

Special Programs in Focus

• Korea
• 2002
• 77min

Based on Cha Bum-suk’s play, Flame in the Valley is set in the mountain village that is wounded by the ideological confrontation of the Korean War. The lives of women who blame the war for the absence of their men have become deva...

Special Programs in Focus

• Taiwan
• 2002
• 108min

I entered the movie world in ’70s and got to know several directors who had studied abroad and returned in ’80s. I was stunned at the variety of camera techniques openly discussed by these directors. In terms of the Taiwanese New ...