Poetry (2010)

Highly Recommended

South Korea

Feature Film

Original Title: 시

Writer/Director: Lee Chang-dong

Cinematographer: Kim Hyun-seok

Cast: Yoon Jeong-hee, Lee David, Kim Hira, Ahn Nae-sang, Park Myeong-sin

A 65-year-old part-time maid struggles manfully to learn how to write poetry, whilst trying to deal with the news that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, that her grandson, whom she is raising in the absence of her daughter, was involved in the sustained gang rape of a classmate who eventually killed herself, and attempting fend off the viagra-enhanced advances of an elderly client, in Lee’s beautifully unpredictable and unpredictably beautiful film, which is filled to the brim with humanity in all its variant forms. Iain.Stott