SUNG Hyun-ah doesn’t mind taking off her clothes for the big screen, but when it comes to meeting the press, the South Ko rean actress is quite shy.

Sung has the lead role in “Time,” by maverick director Kim Ki-duk, which I saw opening night at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic.

Impressed by her performance, I asked for an interview with the actress, who was at the festival with Kim and co-star Ha Jung-woo.

She kept me waiting several days before deciding not to talk, even though festival staffers and her own agent advised her to do so. After all, how often does an actress get a chance to be in Cine File?

But, it seems, she’s shy off camera, and turned down several other interviews, too.

In “Time,” Sung plays a jealous young woman who fears she’s losing her lover. So she does what any woman would do – she gets a completely new face via plastic surgery.

Most of Kim’s movies receive runs in New York, so look for “Time” to get here later this year.

Karlovy Vary is one of Europe’s oldest cinema conclaves (founded in 1946, although it missed a few years during the Communist era).

This year, 268 features and shorts unspooled on screens around the posh spa town, where Beethoven, Chopin and Goethe once took the waters.

The juries included two New Yorkers. Laurence Kardish of the Museum of Modern Art sat on the grand jury and Ray Privett of the Two Boots Pioneer Theater had a spot on another panel.

One of the most popular entries was “Reprise,” which won the best-director prize for Joachim Trier (no relations to Lars von Trier) of Norway.

The story of two aspiring-writer buddies, it is shot in the style of the French New Wave and is stolen by a charming young actress named Viktoria Winge, who looks (on the screen, at least) like Anna Karina in those wonderful movies she made in the 1960s (“Bande à Part,” for example) with then-husband Jean-Luc Godard.

The top prize went to an American movie, Laurie Collyer’s “Sherrybaby,” which also won the best-actress laurel for Maggie Gyllenhaal as a junkie ex-con. Collyer was there to collect the prize, but a very pregnant Gyllenhaal had to stay home.

The festival’s low point was an award for “outstanding contribution to world cinema” for Robert Shaye of New Line Cinema.

It is hard to understand why an event devoted to film as art would honor the man responsible for Hollywood crap like the “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Austin Powers” franchises. Worse, the closing-night audience was forced to sit through a loud trailer for New Line movies.

V.A. Musetto is film editor of The Post.