Kim Hye-ja is back in theaters Wednesday, nine years after her last film.
The star of Bong Joon-ho's Mother opens in Still Shining on October 21, her first film since 2017. She had meant to stop acting.
The Goldscene Desk
Kim Hye-ja opens in Korean theaters on Wednesday in Still Shining. If you know her from one film outside Korea, it is Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009), the widow who will not let her son's case go. This is her first movie since 길 in 2017.
She is 84. She turns 85 next week. At home she has been the television mother for decades, in The Light in Your Eyes and last year's Heavenly Ever After. The films have been rare.
Why she said yes
She had wanted to stop acting. A line from director Song Il-gon changed her mind, and she put it in a handwritten letter to reporters. Sun-ok, her character, does not cry. She believes, to the end, that the time she spent with her friend still shines.
"We have to remember how much those girls suffered," Kim wrote. "But I hope we don't forget what a wonderful life they wanted to live, too. That's why I knew I had to do this."
Song asked her six times, by letter and by visiting her house, before she took it. At a press event he called her the greatest living actor. He talked about close-ups, because "there's a whole universe in her face."
The story
Still Shining follows Sun-ok and her friend Jeong-im, played by Cha Mi-kyung. They find each other again 60 years after they grew up in a mountain village in 1942, the year imperial Japan was taking young Koreans for the war.
It sits with other Korean films about women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, after Spirits' Homecoming and I Can Speak. This one is gentler, built around friendship, aging, and memory, with some sentiment mixed in.
PlusM Entertainment is releasing it. The world premiere was October 8 at the Busan International Film Festival.
Kim was helped down the Busan red carpet and coughed often enough that people worried. On Thursday she missed the press screening at Megabox Coex. Song said she had a cold, that she kept apologizing on the phone, and that she had wanted to come even if someone had to help her in.
Choi Ju-eun, who plays the younger Jeong-im, said Kim told her to do whatever she wanted once the camera rolled. Song passed along what Kim hopes people take home: leave a little warmer, and softer after a good cry.
There is no US date yet. Wednesday is the Korean opening.
Our take: if Mother is the Kim Hye-ja you have, this is the one back in theaters, and Wednesday is the date. She said the history is why she could not turn it down. The still is two old friends holding on.
