2014 Busan International Film Festival - Daemyung Culture Wave Award /
 2015 Goteborg International Film Festival

Synopsis

 A-young does simple chores in a beauty parlour such as removing pimples and blackheads. On the surface, her life is a glamorous one. She dresses in style, attends showings for expensive flats, and brags to her coworkers about her rich boyfriend. In reality, she lives with an alcoholic sister and a brother who only shows up once in a while. She pushes herself into a corner but every new attempt to resolve her situation - fake credit cards, a forged identity - only leads to even worse consequences.

Program Note

 A bragger, A-young wants to realize the Other\'s desire, habitually lying about her husband’s job and the power of her relatives as well as her material assets such as house and car. In other words, she linguistically attempts to fulfill what a society tells women they should have. In that sense The Liar shows that women\'s false consciousness is embodied when women accept socially constructed femininity without their reflective thinking. The reflective thinking is the process of consciousness-raising that feminism has emphasized. The Liar also takes women\'s community as the critically significant social place. The dialogues between nurse assistants at the dermatology clinic make its critical view on women’s community more clear and interesting. Judging guys and others’ appearance, and gossiping about their customers, the nurse assistants actually despise themselves, that is to say their low social status and poor work ethic. Their low self-esteem, bitter envy, and contempt for one another are well depicted when they don\'t trust A-young talks about a middle school teacher who has a lover. Regarding themselves as a social group of victims, they hurt the others and get hurt in the women’s community. This women\'s community is a place where the vulnerable bite off one another with ugly feelings of self-contempt
 and abuse their power. This film thus foregrounds the current concern of women\'s cinema struggling with the monstrous-feminine and self-negativity. [Sunah KIM]