Poetry

Poetry follows Yang Mi-ja, a woman in her sixties living in a small South Korean town in Gyeonggi Province, by the Han River, where she raises her teenage grandson, Jong-wook. Curious and attentive to her appearance, she favors bright clothes and flowered hats. A chance encounter leads her to enrol in a poetry class at a local community centre, and she writes a poem for the first time. She begins looking for beauty in the ordinary surroundings she had never really noticed, until an unsettling turn of events forces her to confront a reality far less lovely than the one she had imagined.

Lee Chang-dong directed and wrote the film, with Lee Joon-dong producing. It is the fifth of the seven features Lee has directed, arriving between Secret Sunshine and Burning, and it follows the pattern of his earlier work in centring on a woman under duress. Yoon Jeong-hee plays Mi-ja, heading a cast of 35 credited performers that includes David Lee as Jong-wook, Kim Hee-ra, Ahn Nae-sang, Kim Yong-taek and Park Myung-shin. The film runs 139 minutes and was released in May 2010.

Critical response was notably stronger than general audience reaction: on IMDb the rating stands at 7.8 from about 15,000 votes, and on TMDB at 7.6 from 351 votes, while critics gave it 8.7 from 72 reviews. Its worldwide box office of roughly 3 million dollars is modest set against its reported 1.3 billion dollar budget.