Close Up

9 November 2016: The Man with Three Coffins

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The Man with Three Coffins
Lee Chang-ho
1987 | 104 min | Colour | 35mm
Followed by Q&A with Lee Chang-ho

“Lee's inimitable masterpiece is a hypnotic trance film and drifting road movie that follows a melancholy widower's journey back into his past as he travels to his dead wife's rural hometown to spread her ashes. Stylistically daring, The Man With Three Coffins uses a floating voice-over and avant-garde montage to evoke, with striking frankness, its anti-hero's sexually charged fears and stinging frustrations. Imbued with the heavy perfume of bitter memories and frustrated desires, The Man With Three Coffins is a work of raw emotional intensity that almost seems itself to be haunted by the same supernatural forces that so disquiet the film and are most powerfully embodied in the uncanny figure of a shaman in direct communication with the shadow world of the departed.” – Harvard Film Archive

Part of the Classics Revisited strand of the London Korean Film Festival