18-year-old secondary-school student Y has decided to lose her virginity. Her friend Woori is in love with a 38-year-old sculptor named J but doesn’t have the courage to make contact with him. Desiring to help her friend, Y calls J to arrange something for Woori. But J’s voice gets Y so excited that she makes a date with him herself. The film depicts J and Y’s passionate, sadomasochistic relationship which eventually grows into a fatal obsession. Director Jang Sun Woo says that after reading the book Tell Me a Lie, banned in Korea shortly thereafter, he didn’t have the slightest desire to turn it into a film and accepted the project only at the insistence of his producer. Most of the sexual practices described in the book were completely foreign to the director. The author of the novel, Jang Jung Il, was sentenced to six months imprisonment for writing Tell Me a Lie. It was Korea’s first case in which an author was prosecuted for pornography. Lies premiered at the Venice IFF in 1999.