Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring · reception & legacy
2003 · Kim Ki-duk
How Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A rapturous arthouse hit abroad in 2003–04 — Ebert canonised it as a Great Movie — even as Kim Ki-duk stayed a marginal figure at home in Korea. It remains his most beloved film, but the sexual-abuse allegations against him that surfaced in 2017–18 have made revisiting it a much more complicated act.
What's debated
It's now the definitive can-you-separate-art-from-artist case in Korean cinema — the most serene film ever made by one of its most disgraced directors — with the real on-screen treatment of animals a second, perennial flashpoint.
Its footprint
The floating hermitage drifting on a mountain lake is one of the most screenshotted, poster-ready images in 2000s world cinema — shorthand for 'meditative movie' in a thousand lists and video essays — along with the film's freestanding doors that characters dutifully use despite there being no walls.
Where it stands
A gateway drug to Korean arthouse and 'slow cinema' — the one Kim Ki-duk film even people who avoid Kim Ki-duk have seen, and a fixture of most-beautiful-films-of-the-2000s lists.