South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong will obtain the lifetime achievement award at this yr’s Malaysia International Movie Competition, the Kuala Lumpur occasion introduced this week because it unveiled this system for its ninth version, operating July 18-25.
Saying the respect, MIFFest president Joanne Goh known as Lee “a filmmaker whose work continues to resonate across cultures and generations through its honesty, compassion, and profound understanding of humanity,” including that his movies “remind us of cinema’s unique ability to inspire empathy, provoke reflection, and connect us through shared human experiences.”
The Malaysian competition will characteristic a particular tribute to Lee, together with screenings of two of his early landmarks, Peppermint Sweet (1998) and Oasis (2002).
A revered determine throughout Asian cinema and a fixture of the key European festivals, Lee has constructed a status — throughout simply six options over three many years — as one thing of an auteur’s auteur, extra treasured by critics and cinephiles than on the field workplace. His movies probe grief, social alienation and ethical ambiguity with a spare, literary depth that displays his early profession as a fiction author. His path to movie got here notably late. A former highschool instructor, he first made his title as a novelist within the Eighties, writing fiction steeped within the pathos and political tumult of South Korea’s military-dictatorship years, and didn’t direct a characteristic till he was previous 40. In a extra unbelievable detour, he stepped away from cinema within the early 2000s to function South Korea’s minister of tradition and tourism, a cupboard put up he held in 2003-04 underneath President Roh Moo-hyun.
However every new Lee Chang-dong movie has landed like an occasion on the competition circuit. Oasis (2002) gained him a finest director prize at Venice; Secret Sunshine (2007) took the perfect actress award at Cannes for its star, Jeon Do-yeon; Poetry (2010) gained the Cannes screenplay prize; and Burning (2018), his haunting Haruki Murakami adaptation, claimed the competition’s worldwide critics’ prize and have become the primary Korean movie shortlisted for the foreign-language Oscar.
Lee’s literary profile has additionally been on the rise within the West of late: Snowy Day and Different Tales, the primary English-language assortment of his fiction, was revealed by Penguin Press in February 2025. And he’s finally nearing a return to the display screen with Attainable Love (working title), now in post-production. Backed by Netflix, the drama is extensively tipped as a contender for this fall’s Venice Movie Competition.
Themed “Resonance,” this yr’s MIFFest will display screen 65 movies from 35 international locations. It opens with the world premiere of Malaysian director Ariff Zulkarnain’s BAGA: Tomorrow Belongs to No One and closes with Yellow Letters, İlker Çatak’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner. Chinese language motion star and filmmaker Wu Jing will gather a separate Glorious Achievement in Movie Award, accompanied by a screening of his wuxia epic Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises within the Desert.
The competition’s competitors, the Malaysia Golden International Awards, options 10 movies by rising administrators — amongst them Taiwanese star Shu Qi’s directorial debut Lady — judged by a panel headed by Indian filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. Sidebars vary from a Hong Kong showcase to debut strands on Korean and Russian cinema, plus an A-Lister part with the newest work from Takashi Miike and Spain’s Oliver Laxe.
MIFFest runs July 18-25 in Kuala Lumpur, with the Golden International Awards handed out on closing evening.
