Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

Synopsis

No one is immune to the power of the seasons and their yearly cycle of birth, growth and decay. Not even the two monks who share a hermitage floating an a pond that is surrounded by mountains. As the seasons unfold, every aspect of their lives is infused with an intensity that leads both to greater spirituality — and tragedy. For they, too, are unable to escape the pull of life, the longings, sufferings and passions that take hold of each and every one of us. Under the watchful eyes of the Old Monk, a Young Monk experiences the loss of innocence when play turns to cruelty ... the awakening of love when a woman enters their closed world ... the murderous power of jealousy and obsession ... the price of redemption ... the enlightenment of experience. Just as the seasons will continue to alternate until the end of time, so will the hermitage always remain a home for the spirit, hovering between now and forever...
Kim Ki-duk, director of such critically acclaimed films as The Isle (Venice, 1999) and Bad Guy (Berlinale, 2002), demonstrates his exceptional talent for relating emotionally complex stories with images of otherworldly beauty.

Biography

KIM Ki-duk delineates himself between filmmakers such as HONG Sangsoo and LEE Chang-dong of 'intellectual inclinations' defining himself as 'non-mainstream' against the latter's 'mainstream.' This is a gesture to separate his ideology and aesthetics from the other. Hence, any 'mainstream sensibility or form of discourse may have been uncomfortable to him who has been roaming the margins.
KIM Ki-duk was born in Bonghwa, north of Kyungsang Province. Growing up in a mountainous village. When he turned nine, he moved to Seoul with his parents. He entered an agriculture training school when he was forced to give up junior high after his older brother was dismissed from school. So he spent working at factories from the age of 17 and joined the marines when he turned 20. After leaving the marines, he spent hvo years at a church for the visually impaired with the intention of becoming a preacher while continuing the painting he started as a child. In 1990 he left for France, 'studying abroad,' selling his own painting for the next two years. He is not the beneficiary of any 'normal' institutional education.
Accordingly, KIM's film life began in a manner quite different from the few channels other filmmakers took. Free of any institutional education in film, he never served as assistant director nor became a film mania. He trained himself while making films, experimenting with the medium at the same time. But this is precisely the reason to the freedom he was able to embrace as a filmmaker. His films can be considered as autobiographical writing with a film camera. This is why KIM describes each and every one of his films as a 'sequence' to his entire body of work.
To KFM, his life, his films and cruelty are intertwined with each other. The cruel reality he expresses may be feared by the audience and abhorred by the critics, yet if the energy that inundates his films, should be acknowledged as dark and wrongful, it couldn't just be a matter of his films. Rather it must be seen as his attempt to address the cruelty of our lives, and of the world we live in.
He adds that film making to him is "a process to change his own misunderstandings into an understanding."

FILMOGRAPHY:

1996 THE CROCODILE
1997 WILD ANIMAL
1998 BIRDCAGE INN
1999 THE ISLE
2000 REAL FICTION
2001 ADDRESS UNKNOWN
2002 BAD GUY
2002 THE COAST GUARD