Chihwaseon

Chihwaseon (취화선, 2002) is a South Korean historical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Im Kwon-taek took home the Best Director prize at Cannes for this film — one of more than a hundred he had made by then. Choi Min-sik, years before Oldboy made him internationally known, plays the lead.

The film traces the life of Jang Seung-eop, a 19th-century painter from the late Joseon Dynasty who rose from poverty to be ranked among the three greatest Korean painters in history. He could produce a brilliant work and forget about it by morning — drink was always closer than discipline, and he refused every patron who tried to control him. When he meets Maehyang, a Catholic gisaeng at a time when Catholicism still carried a death sentence, something briefly anchors him. But Joseon itself is collapsing under Japanese pressure, and nothing holds.

Im Kwon-taek builds the film less as a biopic checklist and more as a series of charged encounters — with patrons, with women, with brush and ink and the bottle — that accumulate into a portrait of someone who lived entirely in the present tense. Son Ye-jin appears in a supporting role alongside veteran Ahn Sung-ki. Stream Chihwaseon online on iFILM.