General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

First Love (첫사랑) (1993 film)

First Love (첫사랑; also released internationally as First Lover) is a 1993 South Korean drama-romance film directed by Lee Myung-se, in which a 19-year-old fine arts freshman falls in love with the older director of her college drama club. It was Lee's third feature, following Gagman (1988) and My Love, My Bride (1990), and was produced by Samho Film.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	January 22, 1993, South Korea; 108 minutes; rated 12 and older³
Director and writers	Lee Myung-se, co-written with Yang Sun-hee¹
Lead cast	Kim Hye-soo as Park Young-shin; Song Young-chang as Kang Chang-wook; Jo Min-ki as Kim Moon-soo¹
Box office	5,856 admissions in Seoul, a commercial failure³
Awards	Blue Dragon Film Awards 1993: Best Actress (Kim Hye-soo) and Best Screenplay (Lee Myung-se); Baeksang Arts Awards 1993: Best Art; Asia-Pacific Film Festival 1993: Special Jury Award⁴
Later standing	Frequently cited by Korean critics as one of the masterpieces of 1990s Korean cinema⁵
Restoration	Original negative lost; digitally remastered from the sole surviving overseas print and released on Blu-ray by the Korean Film Archive in 2024²

Spoilers

Plot

Young-shin (Kim Hye-soo) is a first-year student at a provincial university's fine arts college. She had expected college to bring something new, but her life is an ordinary one of tutoring sessions, cinemas, and coffeehouses. Then Chang-wook (Song Young-chang) is invited to direct the drama club she belongs to. At first she sees him only as a scruffy, chain-smoking drinker, but she comes to love him, so that his ordinary gestures and words become, to her, song and poetry. After a few dates and a first kiss, he leaves her behind.¹ The Korean Film Council's English synopsis adds that Chang-wook is a guest drama lecturer about ten years older than Young-shin.⁶

Production and casting

Lee conceived the film around questions he posed to himself and others: what first love is, what color or shape it has, and why first loves always fail. A dream in which the words "the secret of time" appeared on a blackboard gave him the theme, and he has said the film is close to his own first-love story.²^•⁷ He worked out the overall structure over about a year, then dictated images and dialogue to co-writer Yang Sun-hee, who transcribed them, finishing the screenplay in about a month.²

Casting change. The role of Young-shin was originally offered to Choi Jin-sil, the star of Lee's My Love, My Bride, who reportedly offered to work without pay. After reading the screenplay she objected to the character's personality, and Lee cast Kim Hye-soo instead.⁸^•² The choice drew opposition around the production, since Kim's public image, built on her taekwondo background and earlier roles, did not match the naive girl of the story; Lee cast her because her debut appearance in Kambo (1986) connected with the image he wanted for Young-shin.²

Style

The film departs deliberately from the strict realism that dominated early-1990s Korean cinema. Animation and poems are inserted between chapters, Young-shin's house and neighborhood are openly artificial sets, and the heroine speaks directly into the camera. Lee built specific images with practical means: fans and hand fans carry Song Young-chang's cigarette smoke out the window, roof tiles were coated in cooking oil, and magnolias were hung on the set so the roof glittered at midday. The film compresses all four seasons into its running time, which required an unusually long shoot for the period.² A Google Arts & Culture feature on the Korean New Wave describes it as portraying a college freshman's memories of first love "in fantastic and artificial scenes," and quotes the judgment that if Bae Chang-ho's Our Joyful Young Days was the most romantic Korean film of the 1980s, First Love held that position in the 1990s.⁹

Reception

The film failed commercially, drawing only 5,856 admissions in Seoul, and was later listed among the "cursed" Korean films of the 1990s in a 1999 Premiere survey of the decade's overlooked gems and failures.³^•¹⁰ Lee himself recalled the initial response: "In 1993, people saw it and thought it was childish and embarrassing," adding that momentary judgment can be overturned at any time.¹¹ Over time the film was reevaluated; the Korean Film Council notes that local critics frequently cite it as one of the masterpieces of 1990s Korean cinema despite its cold public reception.⁵ It screened in the Korean retrospective at the first Busan International Film Festival in 1996, at the 4th Korean Film Festival in Paris in 2009, and in the London Korean Film Festival's "Contemporary Classics: Lee Myung-se & The 1990s" program in 2018.¹²^•¹³^•⁶

Kim Hye-soo won Best Actress at the 14th Blue Dragon Film Awards for the role, and Lee won the Best Screenplay prize; the film also took the Baeksang Arts Award for art direction (Cho Yung-sam), the Korean Film Critics Association Award for art direction, and the Asia-Pacific Film Festival Special Jury Award.⁴ Kim has described the film as a turning point in her acting career.⁷

Preservation

The original negative was lost, so the digital remaster had to be made from the single surviving overseas release print, working from remembered colors of key scenes to reconstruct the palette. The restored version screened in the Kim Hye-soo retrospective at the 23rd Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, and the Korean Film Archive released First Love together with My Love, My Bride in a "Lee Myung-se Collection" Blu-ray box set in 2024.²^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026