Yeon Sang-ho's Paradise Lost invited to Toronto

Director Yeon Sang-ho has been officially invited to the Toronto International Film Festival for 2 consecutive years. His new film Paradise Lost was selected for the Special Presentations section of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, following The Ugly.

Paradise Lost is a psychological thriller that begins when Ryu Sun-woo, played by Bae Hyun-sung, returns alive to his mother Ryu So-young, played by Kim Hyun-joo, after he had been believed dead. So-young lost her son in a camping-school bus disappearance 9 years earlier, and the film has confirmed an October theatrical release in Korea.

Yeon was invited in the first half of the year to the Midnight Screenings section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival with Colony. In the second half of the year, he is entering Toronto with Paradise Lost.

After the Toronto invitation news, the international poster for Paradise Lost was released. The poster includes an old photograph of a child with the face torn away, a silhouette emerging from the darkness and Kim Hyun-joo standing with her head lowered in front of the photo. CJ ENM was credited for the photo.

Yeon appears in the opening-comment intro and says he has thought about the dark side of human beings while working on The King of Pigs, The Fake and The Ugly. He describes Paradise Lost as 'the darkest story among the stories I had' and as a film about one mother's desperate struggle after she falls into a dark abyss between a child revived by AI and the real child who returns alive after 9 years.

The trailer opens on Ryu So-young sitting alone on the camping-school bus where the children disappeared and asking, 'Do you know how terrible it was for me that you disappeared?' It then shows So-young relying on her young son in the virtual reality Children of Paradise, before the phrase 'returned' appears with Sun-woo's unfamiliar look after his return in 9 years.

Over tense music, a line says, 'A miracle happened to Sun-woo's mother. The miracle I had always hoped for,' and the trailer closes with the words, 'You are my only son, Sun-woo.' The footage shows Kim Hyun-joo's shaken gaze as she faces her son again and Bae Hyun-sung's unreadable face. Paradise Lost is scheduled to open in theaters in October.