General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Poetry (시) (2010 film)

Poetry (시) is a 2010 South Korean drama film written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, about an elderly woman who enrolls in a poetry class while showing the first signs of Alzheimer's disease and learning that her teenage grandson was involved in a crime connected to a schoolgirl's death. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and won the Award for Best Screenplay.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / director	시 (Shi), written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, his fifth feature¹^•³
Release	May 13, 2010 (South Korea); 139 minutes; produced by Pine House Film⁴^•⁵
Lead performance	Yoon Jeong-hee as Yang Mi-ja, her first film role since 1994, after a 16-year absence from the screen³^•⁵
Cannes 2010	In Competition; Award for Best Screenplay; Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Special Mention; nominated for the Palme d'Or²
Korean honors	Grand Bell Awards 2010: Best Film, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Screenplay⁶
Critical standing	100% Tomatometer from 71 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes; 7.8/10 on IMDb⁷^•⁸
Box office	$349,899 worldwide; roughly 450,000 admissions in South Korea, an unusual result for an art film⁵^•⁹

Spoilers

Plot

Mija (Yoon Jeong-hee) lives in a small town along the Han River with her middle-school-aged grandson Jong-wook (Lee Da-wit), whose mother works in far-off Busan. She works part-time as a caretaker for an elderly invalid, dresses fashionably, and approaches the world with curiosity despite her difficult circumstances.¹⁰^•¹¹ When her doctor tells her she is showing the early signs of Alzheimer's disease, she has trouble remembering ordinary words, and she signs up on impulse for a poetry course at the local cultural center. Her dream is to write a poem, just once in her life.³

The film opens with children playing by the Han River who discover the floating body of a teenage girl, a schoolgirl from Jong-wook's class. Lee treats the discovery placidly, as a harsh fact rather than a shock; the title "Poetry" is superimposed on the close-up of the body, written in English and Korean.¹²^•¹³ The girl had been raped by a group of her classmates, among them Jong-wook, and killed herself. As the girl's suicide initiates a chain of tragic events, Mija learns what her grandson has done and is expected to contribute to the "compensation money" the other boys' fathers are gathering to keep the story quiet.¹¹^•¹³ Her search for poetic inspiration, which begins with observing flowers and everyday beauty, becomes entangled with this moral reckoning, and she must find both the words for a poem and the strength to respond to what her grandson has done.⁸

Production and casting

The character of Yang Mi-ja was written by Lee Chang-dong with Yoon Jeong-hee in mind, an actress who had been a leading figure in Korean film during the 1960s and 1970s but whose last role before this was in Manmubang ("Two Flags") back in 1994. She came out of a 16-year retirement for the role; the Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan noted that she had more than 300 films to her credit and had won a national poll selecting the greatest actress in Korean cinema history.⁵^•¹³ Lee had previously drawn acclaimed lead performances from Han Suk-kyu in Green Fish, Sul Kyung-gu in Peppermint Candy, Moon So-ri in Oasis, and Jeon Do-yeon in Secret Sunshine.¹⁴

The premise drew on real events: Lee had learned of an incident in a small town in which several teenage boys had assaulted a schoolgirl.¹⁵ The idea for the film came to Lee in a Japanese hotel room while he watched a television program made entirely of relaxing nature shots, a peaceful river, birds, fishermen, and soft music, from which a feature film idea began to form.⁵

Reception and awards

At Cannes the film competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Award for Best Screenplay, tied with Mike Leigh's Another Year; it also received a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury, which cited how "through the charm of poetry, Mija, a decent grandmother weakened by disease and culpability, opens up to a contemplative perception of the world."² In South Korea it won four major categories at the 47th Grand Bell Awards, Best Film, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Screenplay, with Yoon Jeong-hee taking the leading-actress prize 16 years after her win for Manmubang.⁶ Yoon also took home the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Best Actress honor, marking the second straight year the award went to a Korean actress, after Kim Hye-ja won it for Mother.⁵

The film's relationship with the Blue Dragon Film Awards was unusual: Lee announced he would boycott the 31st ceremony, so the jury excluded Poetry from the selection but still nominated Yoon for Best Actress, a prize shared with Soo Ae for Midnight FM.⁵ Earlier in its life the film had drawn controversy at home when it received a score of 0 in the Korean Film Council's 2009 master film production support review, a result that industry figures publicly questioned after the Cannes screenplay award.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Critics responded strongly. Rotten Tomatoes records a 100% Tomatometer from 71 reviews, with a critics consensus calling it "an absorbing, poignant drama because it offers no easy answers to its complex central conflict."⁷ Jonathan Romney in The Independent wrote that the film most resembles a novel, subtle and adult, and noted that Lee focuses much of the film on the apparent side issue of the poetry class rather than the crime itself.¹⁸ The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing for MUBI, argued that the film addresses the theme of rape and its role in Korean society directly while avoiding the exploitation or sentimentality of comparable films.¹⁹

Themes and interpretation

Attention as ethics. Several critics read the film as linking artistic attention to moral attention: learning how to see beauty means becoming less able to avoid suffering. The poetry class poses the formal question of how to look closely enough to make a poem, and this gradually becomes an ethical test for Mija.²⁰ Lee himself said at Cannes that "ugliness coexists alongside beauty," a statement that matches the film's structure of quiet observation around a hidden violent act.²⁰

Korean-language scholarship has read the film as an allegory of patriarchal violence and the dehumanization of youth in 2000s Korean society, and as an inquiry into what it means to write poetry, or make films, in an age losing its fundamental values.⁹^•²¹ Like Lee's previous film Secret Sunshine (2007), Poetry involves the death of a child and centers on the gradual transformation of its female protagonist, or rather on the audience's shifting perception of her character; Lee told reporters that Secret Sunshine is a film about a victim while Poetry is a film about a perpetrator.²²^•²³

Legacy

Poetry is regarded as one of the defining works of Lee Chang-dong's career, which later included Burning (2018), the first Korean film shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.²⁴ The film remains available on streaming platforms including the Criterion Channel, and it continues to appear in critical surveys of twenty-first-century cinema.¹¹^•²⁵

References

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