Chihwaseon

Awarded the coveted best director prize last year at Cannes, veteran Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-Taek offers a bold and colorful account of an artist's life in Chihwaseon. The film's focus is on the revolutionary 19th-century painter Jang Seung-Ub, whose womanizing and carousing scandalized moralistic Korean society, but whose stunning watercolors and calligraphy captured indelible images of his native land.

The New York Times praised Im's "own aesthetic command, evident in the movie's wealth of beautiful, perfectly framed images...shots so full of passion and perception that they could almost be paintings themselves." (117 mins.)