This is the first full monograph on the widely acclaimed South Korean director Lee Chang-dong (born 1954), whose 2018 film Burning was the first Korean production shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. With his six features made since taking up filmmaking at the age of 43 (after working as a novelist), Lee has distinguished himself as an uncompromising auteur through his tightly wrought narratives that depict human suffering taken to its limits. His films tend to follow conventional genre structures, including thriller and melodrama, but are consistently surprising in both their emotional subtlety and their characters’ confrontations with Korean history and politics. The latest in a monograph series from Dis Voir, the book was designed by Lee himself, who selected and arranged all the images, and includes an interview with the director along with several scholarly essays on his work.

Other volumes in the series include Wong Kar-Wai, Tsai Ming Liang, Kim Ki-Duk and Atom Egoyan.