Lee Chang Dong's films question the status of the visible and the invisible, in a world saturated with images and information that oscillates between reality and fantasy, history and fiction.
Against a backdrop of social and political critique, his films explore the aesthetics of disappearance through the off-screen, and capture the loss of our memory of history and nature. His « perceptive » images create empathy with young adults as they grapple with existential despair, trapped in a hopeless world despite their rage.
Lee Chang-dong's films plays with cinematographic categories, concealing stories in nested narratives and chronological ellipses, or layering them into the soundtrack.
Halfway between fiction and a documentary testimony of our times, Lee Chang-dong invents a universe of images that appeal to perception and imagination by conjuring up the viewer's (invisible) mental images. Memory resurges to perceive a « little something » that blurs the contour of reality, while the world evaporates and disappears into the virtual.
