DANS LA TOILE
Cobweb, Kim Jee-woon’s film within a film
With Cobweb, the South Korean director Kim Jee-woon presents a comedy on artistic creation immersed in the world of cinema. The film, presented as a Midnight Screening, brings together, among others, the star actor Song Kang-ho, member of the Feature Film Jury in 2021 and Best Actor Award winner in 2022 for Broker, by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
In Cobweb, his eleventh feature film, Kim Jee-Woon examines the reasons for Kim Ki-yeol’s obsessions, a director from the 1970s haunted by the desire to re-shoot the end of his latest film. He is persuaded that by changing it, he’ll have the masterpiece no one saw. But when chaos takes over the set and the rewriting of the final scene doesn’t convince the actors or producers, Kim’s task becomes complicated.
The South Korean filmmaker explains that he has never thought so intensely on the meaning of cinema as when creating this comedy that was born in the middle of the pandemic. Kim Jee-woon thought up the screenplay for Cobweb while he was suffering from pessimistic thoughts about the future of the world and of cinema. “The pandemic brought about unprecedented changes in our lives and forced us to reconsider various fundamental questions. What is a film? What does it mean to make films? What is creativity and what is originality?”, he wondered.
The misadventures of the director Kim Ki-yeol on set and the story of the film he’s trying to change the ending of unfold in parallel in front of the spectator, in colour and in black and white. Through this film, Kim Jee-woon wanted to send “a message of hope and of provisional optimism: cinema will continue, just as life continues, despite all of its ironies and all of its difficulties.”
