Arirang Kim Ki-Duk (South Korea)

The South Korean director hits the audience like a truck with his skin-peelingly intimate self-documentary, Arirang. Arirang is a Korean folk song people sing when they feel lonely and desperate since our whole earthly struggle is an unceasing alternation of climbing up and tumbling down. Kim Ki-duk exposed himself to the core made many flee from the screening room as soon as the film ended on the first screening while made the other half erupt in a standing ovation.

Arirang is a movie about the loneliness of a director lamenting about the unavoidable: the betrayals and hopeless longings, and about the crises of an artist who questions the meaning of his whole oeuvre. The movie also plays with genres as it is blending self-documentary with a fictitious revenge drama. Though Kim Kim-duk presents his drama in a minimalist style, he gives great concern to cutting on motion to heighten the intensity of the (inner) rhythm and composition including colour content and design.

Kim Ki-duk made his latest movie three years ago. Since then – when one of her actresses almost died during shooting - he has withdrawn from the world living marred by guilt in a tent set up in a confined small house – which is a metaphor for an agonizing artist locked up in his own head unable to stop analysing himself and the world around him. ”Since I was born, my life was lonely and hard”, confesses the director desperately struggling with the ambivalence whether to carry on with his works as a director and with his desperately lonely life – caused by his introvertedness from childhood and his betrayal by friends and lovers – or to give up.

The director goes through all the stages of desperation: first he is just contemplating what he thinks about his life and the world around him while his shadow is interrogating him; then he burst out in anger killing (here comes the fiction) three important people in his life who betrayed him – which is a metaphor for forgiving and letting them go – to finally reach a climax while watching a sequence from his movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring that despite all the descending it is still worth carrying on.

But it is far beyond mere narcissistic wallowing in self-pity. Instead, the director presents his personal drama with a load of insightful self-irony and earthy wit. At one point Kim Ki-duk confesses that if the South-Korean officials had seen any of his movies, they would not have given him honours for earning a name for his country by winning prizes at international festivals, since all of his movies are loaded with criticism on the South Korean society just being on its way of modernization.

Living with his cat, the director - who became a factory worker at the age of fifteen and did not make his way even to high school - also reveals the deep sadness about this world being nothing but self-torture, masochism and sadism, as he says many times. He also gets into a fit of rage swearing at actors who want nothing but evil parts. They choose the easiest way: operating on their instincts. "To play the evil parts you need nothing but to blow up your anger", the director accuses them.

The crying and whining and shouting and singing of Kim Ki-duk will definitely scare most of the audience as ruthless honesty is something we do not tolerate for it is too inconvenient. Kim Ki-duk’s heartbreakingly and fearlessly honest self-portrait will only be embraced by the bravest.