For Lee Myung-Se, cinema is both a journey through the labyrinth of dreams and a detective’s report, taking images from within the brain and projecting them onto the screen. M (2007) contains within it both the sweet fantasy of First Love (1993) and the desolation of Their Last Love Affair (1996), which poisons both body and mind. Mimi (Lee Yeon-hee) is the core of this memoryfilm. The memory-film, as Lee Myung-Se conceives it, is a process of suffering through insomnia, summoning fragmented memories, and slipping unknowingly in and out of time and space like a sleepwalker. The white curtain over the window and the giant tent pitched in the schoolyard are at once screens onto which images from Minwoo’s (Gang Dong-won) brain are projected and the relentless gaze of a ghost summoning him. If his previous work The Duelist (2005), through repeated expansions and transformations of planes, arrived at the beautiful interplay of movement and disappearance, M is a desperate game of hide-and-seek in which the planes and depths of cinema chase one another, straining to make contact with Minwoo’s fractured memory-screen. The ghost named Mimi, memory, and love, play with cinema’s passion only to arrive, in the end, at Lee Myung-Se himself.
Born in 1957. He graduated from the Department of Film at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and made his feature directorial debut with Gagman (1988). Known for his distinctive visual style in Korean cinema, he made films such as My Love, My Bride (1990), First Love (1993), and M (2007). He won the Grand Prize and Best Director at the Deauville Asian Film Festival and the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival for Nowhere to Hide (1999), and Best Director at the Baeksang Arts Awards for Duelist (2005).
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
