Im Kwon-taek, Hanji (Talbit kirŏ olligi, 2011) / making hanji in the mountains with pure Korean materials.

Kyŏnu as a child being dragged to the women’s bath by his mother

Girl crying on a mountaintop, feeling sad that she cannot forget her dead love

The film’s title interposed between the map shapes, alongside Hyeju’s silhouetted form, at the end of the title sequence. The mise-en-scène here demonstrates the duality of structure in young women’s lives—as enabling but also confining—which the film also demonstrates in its approach to the characters’ aspirations, abilities, and built environments.

Chiyŏng’s textile patterns suggest a desire for order and stable containment, even as she is utterly boxed in by poverty and the densely layered, urban habitats through which she moves.

O Tae-su confronts the snickering Yi U-jin in the latter’s penthouse lair.

O Tae-su flashes an enigmatic smile that might be construed as crying in one of the film’s striking final images.

Sumi (Im Su-jŏng, right) comforts her spectral sister, Suyŏn (Mun Kŭn-yŏng, left), in A Tale of Two Sisters.

Ŭnju (Yŏm Chŏng-a) as victim and villain in A Tale of Two Sisters.

The mysterious housebreaker T’aesǒk makes his own digital “family portrait” in 3-Iron.

The forbidden lovers—Sŏnhwa and T’aesǒk—steal a kiss behind the back of the married woman’s oblivious husband in 3-Iron.

A humorous moment that turns bittersweet: they never see her alive again.

The dying monster: “It feels pain all the time.”

A family in the making

The homemade family

Sinae prepares to forgive Tosŏp for the murder of her child, in a scene that brings to mind a similar confrontation between civilian and prisoner in Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963).

The final shot of Secret Sunshine, a long take lasting two and a half minutes, concludes with a slow pan that directs our attention to a small patch of earth (rather than to the heavens above) and shows little else besides leaves, mud, plastic odds and ends, and the protagonist’s snipped hair.

Sŭngch’ŏl comes out of the door, but there is no path, only a precarious cliff.

Chun and Sunhŭi’s circuitous journey around Seoul.

Chun walks along the Ch’ŏnggyech’ŏn Stream.