With an absurdist and critical eye on Korean society, IM Sang-soo is no stranger to controversy – whether it’s dealing with risqué subjects as in A Good Lawyer’s Wife or political hot buttons as with The President’s Last Bang. Now he has taken on KIM Ki-young’s watershed classic The Housemaid (1960) and turned it into an idiosyncratic remake to premiere in the Cannes festival’s Competition.

Frozen Land is the fourth short film made by director KIM Tae-yong, a student at Sejong University, majoring in film art. His film presents a dark vision of the injustice of life and a corrupted world through the complicated adventures of those cornered in life. The plot follows Kyeong-jae, Byeong-jo and their friends who guide and secretly hand over Chinese illegal immigrants and a woman from the smuggled group. Although he resides in an illegal world hiding away from the law, Kyeong-jae dreams of buying a truck and living as any common citizen. Then one day an unfortunate accident occurs to one of the Chinese groups that he handed over to the middleman, and an unexpected opportunity finds him when Chinese woman Yu-hong with a large amount of money is the sole survivor of the accident.

A hard-gore thriller Bedevilled, JANG Cheol-soo’s feature debut, follows the genre’s logics in its every move. Staged in an isolated island called ‘Mudo’, this bloody cruel murder story weaves fears from patriarchical violence and anxiety from self-centered modern life shut down from other people’s lives into ghastly atmosphere. Awarded the best work at Korean Film Script Market and also won KOFIC’s HD production support award in 2008, the film clearly shows the filmmaker’s smashing talent to bring a sense of anxiety shed by juxtaposition of two opposite female characters into a solid genre frame.

No one can deny the value of HONG Sangsoo as one of the most prominent directors of 21st century Korean cinema. For the last decade or so, as the director’s ideals were established and became ripe, HONG Sangsoo’s films emerged as a mighty fortress for Korean cinema. Working at a distance from the commotion of Korean films in the new century resulting from an acute industrialization drive, HONG Sangsoo had secured his own fame both in and out of the country through unique and daring pieces of work. Hahaha is the 10th film made by HONG Sangsoo, a director who first appeared in mid 1990s in a rather crude and foreign way.

Novelist turned film director LEE Chang-dong will visit the Cannes film festival with his fifth movie Poetry. With Secret Sunshine’s invitation to the Cannes’ competition section 3 years ago, he had presented an epic of self-salvation and pain caused by mundane life. This time, he has returned with a piece that studies meaning of poetry through a woman in her 60s, who tries writing poems for the first time.