South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong will receive the lifetime achievement award at this year’s Malaysia International Film Festival, the Kuala Lumpur event announced this week as it unveiled the program for its ninth edition, running July 18-25.
Announcing the honor, MIFFest president Joanne Goh called Lee “a filmmaker whose work continues to resonate across cultures and generations through its honesty, compassion, and profound understanding of humanity,” adding that his films “remind us of cinema’s unique ability to inspire empathy, provoke reflection, and connect us through shared human experiences.”
The Malaysian festival will feature a special tribute to Lee, including screenings of two of his early landmarks, Peppermint Candy (1998) and Oasis (2002).
A revered figure across Asian cinema and a fixture of the major European festivals, Lee has built a reputation — across just six features over three decades — as something of an auteur’s auteur, more treasured by critics and cinephiles than at the box office. His films probe grief, social alienation and moral ambiguity with a spare, literary intensity that reflects his early career as a fiction writer. His path to film came notably late. A former high school teacher, he first made his name as a novelist in the 1980s, writing fiction steeped in the pathos and political tumult of South Korea’s military-dictatorship years, and didn’t direct a feature until he was past 40. In a more improbable detour, he stepped away from cinema in the early 2000s to serve as South Korea’s minister of culture and tourism, a cabinet post he held in 2003-04 under President Roh Moo-hyun.
