Korean cinema rules and deserves a thread.

There's a thread for New Korean Cinema on ILF but figure we could have a catch-all thread as we do with French, Italian, Japanese cinema (without the shitty titles).

BFI doing a huge retro of 60's stuff coupled with 00's New Cinema selections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25ViBZdRXBE

So far I've seen two films: Hong Eun-won's A Woman Judge (1962) is the second film directed by a woman in S Korea. The first is a lost film, and this was considered as such as well for many decades before a copy turned up. Said copy is in very bad shape, missing both the beginning and the ending, which gives the film a somewhat surreal feel. The story is pretty engaging, very much not progressive for the current era but pretty brave within its context. The copy was so damaged I can't say much about Eun-won as a visual storyteller, but she was def good at melodrama, getting you to root for the main character against the horrible snobbish family she gets settled with.

2008's Sisters On The Road, by Book ji-young, is about a woman returning to her childhood home after her mother's death; she then convinces her sister to go looking for her (but not the sister's) estranged father. Cue a trip to Jeju Island. The protagonist is very unlikeable but the portrayal is very psychologically astute, you get how she got there. There's also an amazing plot twist which I won't discuss. The film was a commercial failure and the director is now a film teacher. Very much worth seeking out.

Bookmarked

Need to catch some of these!

A Girl At My Door is one I really want to see.

This channel deserves way more love in general but I highly recommend the four part crash course on the Golden Age (1960's) of South Korean cinema,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGrFzYXlD0

Was only able to catch Die bad, which is a loosely constructed four shortish films in one.

The one with the documentary interviews cut with the really long fight scene was my favourite.

I managed to catch two screenings in the series during a temporary London sojourn:

Barking Dogs Never Bite (Bong Joon-ho, 2000). Extremely low-stakes black comedy set in a dreary apartment complex and involving canine abuse that shouldn't be funny, but is. More of a dry run for his later work but Bae Doona's unbelievably dorky performance elevates the whole thing tenfold.

A Bloodthirsty Killer (Lee Yong-min, 1965). Utterly nuts horror flick whereby a family are very reasonably haunted by the ghost of a young woman they've all spectacularly wronged. Extremely odd left turn into religious iconography for the denouement.

NEXT PARK CHAN WOOK IS A DONALD WESTLAKE ADAPTATION

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Other_Choice

That’s a fantastic novel. So grim.

finally saw the housemaid (the original) and while it has a few poor line choices here and there, mainly at the start, but also that 'dont want anyone to leave the cinema on a bummer' address at the end lol, its so, so good. totally see why its a classic. it just piles one more problem/dilemma on to another, until its fit to burst, it has a lot of moral shading, and is good at pulling the rug out from under your feet (eg for a sec i thought the wife was going to be really sisterly to the maid but that was quickly undone). its obv a potboiler, but a really inventive one. am really curious to see what the remake is like now.

Amazing film! The ending address is great too once you think about it - whose story/fantasy have we even been watching? There seem to be a couple of sequels which I will try and see with low expectations but you never know.

also the actress who plays the maid, she feels like quite a modern female character. for some weird reason, she made me think of madonna in desperately seeking susan (80s so maybe not that modern but hey).

Splendid Outing - Korean girlboss widow gets told by shaman that she had a twin who died in the womb and must regain that "part" of her. She promptly drives to the seaside and gets abducted by a fisherman who insists she's his runaway wife. Kind of a folk horror take on a psychological thriller, reminded me of Rosemary's Baby and all those post-Diaboliques Hammer films. The protagonist is not at all sympathetic in early scenes but to the film's credit it never paints her abduction into trad patriarchy as anything but horrific. Made in the 70's and according to some of the ppl in the extras of the Radiance blu ray a metaphor for the then current dictatorship.

That sounds great, added to the ever-growing watch list