Following the Lotterdam Film Festival, the Netherlands, in 1997 and The Sanfransico Asian Film Festival, the U.S., the 40th PESARO International Film Festival, scheduled to be held from June 25 through July 3 in Italy, holds Korean film director Jang Sun-woo's retrospective.
Jang Sun-woo (b. 1952) is undoubtedly one of the most relevant and distinctive voices in contemporary Korean cinema.
Since his debut feature, Seoul Jesus (1986), co-directed with Wan Son-u, his works have always displayed an incessant need to find and explore new resources in the language of cinema, and have often questioned audiences about controversial issues in Korean society.
In the early 90s his films began to acquire international recognition, thus contributing to the detection of the first signs of a renewal in Korean cinema.
In 1994, Hwaomkyung was awarded the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival; in 1996, the International Film Festival Rotterdam chose Jang as one of its Filmmakers in Focus.
A couple of his subsequent features, Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movie (1998) and Lies (1999) stirred up great controversy and had serious problems with censorship.
The latter, based on a novel that was accused of being pornographic and which had gotten its author imprisoned, was the first Korean film to compete at the Venice film festival in thirteen years, and found wide distribution in many European countries.
English 
