A Smile

Photographer So-Jung (Joo), working on shots of a famous smiling Buddha, discovers that she is gradually losing her sight. The first casualty is her plan to visit the US; the second is her computer-nerd boyfriend (Song, director of Flower Island), who gets the push. After a disastrous family reunion at her grandmother's funeral, she decides to take some flying lessons before it's too late. Her progress towards her first solo flight is interrupted by a brief fling with her instructor (Cho), but she's impatient to find out if it's true that 'flying high gives a broad vision'. This debut feature by a young woman (nurtured by one of Korea's best-known women directors, Im Soon-Rye) constructs an original and persuasive account of one woman's search for a new way to define herself and her talents. A Buddhist perspective seems to hover just offscreen.