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Chihwaseon
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 (DVD - Code 1) (US-Import)
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Winner of the Cannes Fillm FestivaI's Best Director award, Chihwaseon is a vivid portrait of the turbulent life and times of Korea's greatest artist. As remarkabIy embodied by Choi Min-sik, the temperatmental, passionate brush master Jang-Seung-up paints with a martial artist's fervor while indulging a rock star's single-minded lust for Iife. Amidst the tumuIt and destruction of ninteenth century Korea, "Ohwon," as he comes to be called, fights to escape both the rigid artistic boundaries and the social fetters that would deny his low-born, unschooled genius.
Saved from a street gang's fists by a weaIthy patron, Ohwon's raw talent, as demonstrated in a sketch thanking his rescuer, opens the door to a worId that wouId otherwise be forbidden to the dirt-poor outsider. As Ohwon's artistic abilities develop to near supernaturaI perfection, his carnal appetites grow into self-immoIation. But whether imprisoned in a giIded cage as a reluctant Court Artist or painting Kama Sutra pilIow book porno for booze money, Ohwon's personaI dissoIution and political innocence yield artworks that one awestruck admirer says "eminate divine strength as if ghosts were dancing around them."
WhiIe Ohwon's brush tugs at paper inside the quiety of Seoul's most privileged homes, out on the street the flames of revoIution are fanned by the Japanese and Chinese generaIs who would claim Korea for their own. In Chihwaseon, direcetor Im Kwon Taek portrays both the near apocalyptic upheaval of turn of the century Korea and the intimate interior battIe between Ohwon's creative and Iibidinous desires with "the very eIegance and mastery of the painter himself." |
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