Poetry

Poetry (시, 2010) — watch online Lee Chang-dong's South Korean drama that took the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes. Veteran actress Yun Jeong-hie returned to film after a sixteen-year absence to play Mija, a woman in her sixties living in a small town along the Han River with her teenage grandson.

She signs up for a local poetry class, driven by a sudden hunger to see the world properly — to find the word for a flower's colour, for the way light moves on water. At the same time she learns what her grandson has done to a schoolmate. The two things — the search for beauty and the weight of what she now knows — sit inside the same woman, in the same days.

Lee Chang-dong gives neither storyline a resolution that feels clean. That discomfort is the film's point. The poem Mija finally writes is one of the most quietly devastating endings in contemporary Korean cinema. Stream Poetry (2010) online on iFILM.