General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Secret Sunshine (밀양)

Secret Sunshine (밀양, Milyang) is a 2007 South Korean drama directed and co-written by Lee Chang-dong, in which a widowed mother who moves to the city of Miryang with her young son is shattered by his kidnapping and murder and then turns to evangelical Christianity in search of relief from grief. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where Jeon Do-yeon won the Award for Best Actress for her performance as Shin-ae.¹ Song Kang-ho plays Jong-chan, a local mechanic who befriends her.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / screenplay	Lee Chang-dong, from an original story by Yi Chong-jun¹^•²
Cast	Jeon Do-yeon (Shin-ae), Song Kang-ho (Jong-chan)¹
Cannes 2007	In Competition; Jeon Do-yeon won Best Actress, the first Korean to receive an acting award at the festival¹^•³
South Korean release	May 23, 2007; 1,605,544 admissions and $7,508,916 gross on 305 screens⁴
Runtime	142 minutes (Cannes and Criterion listings; the Korean Film Archive database lists 141 minutes)¹^•⁵
Critical scores	94% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (32 reviews); Metascore 84 on Metacritic (6 reviews)⁶^•³
Home video	Director-approved Criterion Collection edition, Spine #576²

Spoilers

Plot

Shin-ae, a piano teacher, travels with her son Jun from Seoul to Miryang, the hometown of her recently deceased husband, to make a fresh start. Her car breaks down on the way, and Jong-chan, who runs a tow service, helps her and later finds her a space to open a piano academy attached to a house.⁵ One evening after returning late from a dinner with neighbors, she finds Jun missing and receives a ransom call; the boy's body is soon found, and the director of the speech academy he attended is arrested for the crime.⁵

Consumed by grief, Shin-ae is drawn to a church through the persistent proselytizing of a pharmacist neighbor, and comes to believe her inner wounds have been healed there. She then decides to forgive her son's kidnapper and visits him in prison, but when he tells her calmly that God has already forgiven him, her composure breaks and her faith begins to collapse.⁵ A synopsis distributed by the festival describes the aftermath as a woman who, finding even religion denied to her, "wages a war against God."⁷

Title and source

The Korean title is also the name of the setting: Miryang, a city in South Gyeongsang Province, translates as "secret sunshine," and the English release title takes its meaning from the town.⁸ The film adapts a short story by the novelist Yi Chong-jun, Lee's frequent literary source; a scholarly comparison of the story ("Bug Story," 벌레 이야기) and the film records substantial differences in characters, narrative method, structure, and ending, while both share an existential situation and the problem of theodicy, the question of divine justice in the face of suffering.²^•⁹

Themes and reception

Critics have read the film as an examination of grief, forgiveness, and religious faith rather than a doctrinal statement about religion. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls it "a grueling, albeit moving, piece of beautifully acted cinema" that plumbs tragedy without succumbing to melodrama.⁶ A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it "a great movie, by a major figure in world cinema," and Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice named it one of the year's best films.³ Some reviewers noted the length: V.A. Musetto of the New York Post suggested Lee could have cut 30 minutes, while crediting Jeon's performance with keeping the film from "drowning in an ocean of tears."³

Jeon's performance is the element most consistently singled out. She won Best Actress at Cannes 2007, the first acting award for a Korean performer at the festival, and the Boxoffice review noted the historic character of the prize.¹^•³ Academic work on the film has analyzed Shin-ae's arc through psychological frameworks of trauma and forgiveness, describing a breakdown of her worldview after her son's death, an attempt to reconstruct meaning through religion and forgiveness, and eventual spiritual disillusionment.¹⁰ A theological reading similarly treats the film as a realistic depiction of the problem of salvation, ending with an image of "secret sunshine" falling into a sewer.¹¹

Production and legacy

The film was produced by Pine House Film with cinematography by Cho Yong-kyu, music by Christian Basso, and editing by Kim Hyun, and sold internationally by CJ Entertainment.¹²^•¹ Lee Chang-dong, who had directed Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (1999), and Oasis (2002) and served as South Korea's Minister of Culture and Tourism from 2003 to 2004, established his international standing with the film.¹³^•¹⁴

The Criterion Collection issued a director-approved special edition (Spine #576) with a new transfer supervised by Lee and cinematographer Cho Yong-kyu, interviews with Jeon and Song Kang-ho, and an essay by the critic Dennis Lim.² In 2026, following the Silver Lion (Grand Jury Prize) won by Lee's new film Possible Love at the Venice International Film Festival, Netflix began streaming Secret Sunshine and Green Fish in late August in Italy, the UK, France, Australia, and New Zealand, as part of a wider global release of Lee's catalog.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2006 to 2009

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

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