Cinema Showcase Hosted by Fred Craden & Cat Kim
BURNING
Shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film
Winner of both the FIPRESCI and International Cinephile
Society Critics’ Awards at Cannes Film Festival
Monday, January 28 at 7 pm | Members $7 | Public $12 | Free for young film fans members!
Lee Chang-dong’s latest triumph weighs the delicate balance between creation and destruction as a writer runs into an old classmate who gets him caught up in a mystery bigger than both of them.
Expanded from Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning, Korean master auteur Lee Chang-dong, known for searing, emotional dramas such as Secret Sunshine and Poetry, returns to cinema. Burning begins by tracing a romantic triangle of sorts: Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring writer, becomes involved with a childhood friend, Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), about to embark on a trip to Africa. She returns weeks later with a fellow Korean, the Gatsby-esque Ben (Steven Yeun), who has a mysterious source of income and a very unusual hobby. A tense, haunting multiple-character study, the Burning accumulates a series of unanswered questions and unspoken motivations to conjure a totalizing mood of uncertainty and quietly bends the contours of the thriller genre to brilliant effect. (S. Korea, 2018, 148 min., NR, Korean with English subtitles| Dir. Lee Chang-dong)
At Cannes Film Festival, Burning was named best film by both critics’ groups, the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) and the International Cinephile Society. Burning was also ferociously popular with all other critics, with an average score of 3.8 out of 4 at Screen International’s jury grid, based on star-based ratings by film critics of prominent media outlets around the world on the movies at Cannes. The score was the highest in the history of the system, surpassing the 3.7 for Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann.”
