NEW YORK.-The Museum of Modern Art presents the first complete North American retrospective of Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk. Kim Ki-Duk, a 14-film exhibition that includes several features never before seen in the U.S., is presented April 23 through May 8, 2008 in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, giving audiences a rare chance to chart the development of the director's sensuous imagery and strong narratives. Kim will be present on opening night, April 23, to introduce a screening of his latest feature Soom (Breath, 2007). The exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Hahn Dong-Sin, founder of the Korean cultural organization Open Work, New York.

Kim Ki-Duk (b. 1960, Bonghwa), a self-taught maverick Korean filmmaker, has been a factory worker, soldier, priest-in-training, and, between 1992 and 1995, a street artist in France, where he discovered cinema through the films of Leos Carax and Jonathan Demme. After winning a screenwriting competition in Korea, Kim was able to make, without any formal training, his first feature, Crocodile (1996). Over the next 11 years, 13 more films followed, including his best-known film, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003).

Kim’s films cohere into a vivid and compelling body of work characterized by sweeping camera movements and long, thoughtfully composed shots. They are populated by characters, uneasy in their social situations, who adopt silence as a protection and whose reactions tend to be brutal; this savagery distinguishes these narratives. His stories are often set on islands or in worlds circumscribed by water, as in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Hwal (The Bow, 2005), and Seom (The Isle, 2000), but Kim’s keen eye situates his films in a space that is remarkably vivid and cinematic.