Lee Chang-dong
Zhang was then a 38-year-old professor of Chinese Literature at Yanbian University when an argument with a film director friend led him to take a bet that "anyone can make a film." With no technical training but with the support of film industry friends such as Lee Chang-dong, he set out to direct his first short film "Eleven" (2001), a fourteen-minute nearly silent vignette of an eleven-year-old boy's encounter with a group of soccer players his own age set in a post-industrial wasteland. "Eleven" was invited to compete at the 58th Venice International Film Festival and several other international film festivals, and this unexpected success made Zhang decide to become a full-time filmmaker. He later said, "Conveying emotion through text and through images are two very different things. If I were able to convey my views fully through text, I wouldn't have to bother with making films, right? I don't like it when I smell some sort of literature-based narrative in films." [...] "I tell people that I got divorced from literature and married the cinema."