Oasis

Director: Lee Chang-dong, Lee Chang-dong, Lee Chang-dong, Lee Chang-dong, Lee Chang-dong

2002 / 133min

Jong-du (Sul Kyung-gu), just out of prison, very little reformed, and shunned by his family, finds an unlikely soulmate in the person of Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), a woman with severe cerebral palsy—and the daughter of the victim of the hit-and-run for which he was jailed—who’s kept cloistered in a meager apartment by her brother, who cares only for the government assistance she brings in. Without a place in a cruelly judgmental society, the couple increasingly take shelter in fantasy in Lee’s magical realism-inflected third feature, an enormously affecting work about love’s blossoming in the least promising of terrains.