Oasis

A hit in Korea and winner of the director's award at the 2002 Venice festival, this is a social commentary - and an awkward, even disturbing, but somehow charming love story about two anti-heroes: Jong-Du, a slightly retarded ex-con, and his love interest Gong-Ju, a woman with cerebral palsy. The relationship between these marginalised characters questions what constitutes desire. The camerawork enhances the claustrophobic feeling of living in an overcrowded city, of being different in a world that endorses homogeneity. And the metaphor of the oasis is used not as a serene place for refuge, but as an abnormal and misplaced phenomenon.