Burning

A bashful writer, Jong-su, meets a beautiful young woman who says she was once attracted to him in school. He does not remember her from the past but falls hard for her in the present. Soon his uneventful life changes dramatically. Reporting on Burning from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called it “one of the strongest films in competition.” A former South Korean Minister of Culture, director Lee Chang-Dong, (with six esteemed films to his credit, including Poetry and Secret Sunshine) twists the conventional tropes of gender and class into an unfamiliar and stunning mystery.