South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong will receive the lifetime achievement award at this year’s Malaysia International Film Festival, the Kuala Lumpur event announced this week as it unveiled the program for its ninth edition, running July 18-25.
Announcing the honor, MIFFest president Joanne Goh called Lee “a filmmaker whose work continues to resonate across cultures and generations through its honesty, compassion, and profound understanding of humanity,” adding that his films “remind us of cinema’s unique ability to inspire empathy, provoke reflection, and connect us through shared human experiences.”
The Malaysian festival will feature a special tribute to Lee, including screenings of two of his early landmarks, Peppermint Candy (1998) and Oasis (2002).
A revered figure across Asian cinema and a fixture of the major European festivals, Lee has built a reputation — across just six features over three decades — as something of an auteur’s auteur, more treasured by critics and cinephiles than at the box office. His films probe grief, social alienation and moral ambiguity with a spare, literary intensity that reflects his early career as a fiction writer. His path to film came notably late. A former high school teacher, he first made his name as a novelist in the 1980s, writing fiction steeped in the pathos and political tumult of South Korea’s military-dictatorship years, and didn’t direct a feature until he was past 40. In a more improbable detour, he stepped away from cinema in the early 2000s to serve as South Korea’s minister of culture and tourism, a cabinet post he held in 2003-04 under President Roh Moo-hyun.
But each new Lee Chang-dong film has landed like an event on the festival circuit. Oasis (2002) won him a best director prize at Venice; Secret Sunshine (2007) took the best actress award at Cannes for its star, Jeon Do-yeon; Poetry (2010) won the Cannes screenplay prize; and Burning (2018), his haunting Haruki Murakami adaptation, claimed the festival’s international critics’ prize and became the first Korean film shortlisted for the foreign-language Oscar.
Lee’s literary profile has also been on the rise in the West of late: Snowy Day and Other Stories, the first English-language collection of his fiction, was published by Penguin Press in February 2025. And he is at last nearing a return to the screen with Possible Love (working title), now in post-production. Backed by Netflix, the drama is widely tipped as a contender for this fall’s Venice Film Festival.
Themed “Resonance,” this year’s MIFFest will screen 65 films from 35 countries. It opens with the world premiere of Malaysian director Ariff Zulkarnain’s BAGA: Tomorrow Belongs to No One and closes with Yellow Letters, İlker Çatak’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner. Chinese action star and filmmaker Wu Jing will collect a separate Excellent Achievement in Film Award, accompanied by a screening of his wuxia epic Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert.
The festival’s competition, the Malaysia Golden Global Awards, features 10 films by emerging directors — among them Taiwanese star Shu Qi’s directorial debut Girl — judged by a panel headed by Indian filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. Sidebars range from a Hong Kong showcase to debut strands on Korean and Russian cinema, plus an A-Lister section with the latest work from Takashi Miike and Spain’s Oliver Laxe.
MIFFest runs July 18-25 in Kuala Lumpur, with the Golden Global Awards handed out on closing night.