The New York Korean Film Festival 2006
It’s not news to anyone cognizant of contemporary international cinema that recent films coming out of South Korea have become rather trendy. In the last five years especially, Korean films have steadily attained as high a profile as those of the country’s close neighbors. In the U.S., arthouse films, martial arts epics, thrillers, and horror movies compete admirably with those of Hong Kong and Japan, forming an imaginary niche-cinema archipelago that promises the extremities of Asia in the face of the purportedly more tepid occidental varieties. The representatives of South Korea at international film festivals seem to increase exponentially each year: six Korean films were shown in the first forty-two years of the New York Film Festival, while last year’s festival featured three. Certainly this newfound trendiness now makes Korean films valuable fodder for Hollywood’s indefatigable remake-mill. This summer’s Bullock-Reeves weepie, The Lake House, may be the first of this trend, being an anglicized reading of the 2000 Korean romance, Il Mare (other remake prospects include Oldboy and, more oddly, the rather localized JSA).
Whatever the cultural source of this recent fascination with the films of South Korea (a recent awakening from historical amnesia? the enchanting mysteries of the Orient? the enduring conundrum of the nation’s northern counterpart?), the political causes are more obvious. With the relaxation of censorship laws in the late 1980s, the Korean Film Council (KOFIC), founded in the early seventies as a bureaucratic monolith of censorship and government propaganda, now serves as both the mouthpiece and the financier for the dozens of films produced in South Korea each year. With this simultaneous availability of funding and lifting of thematic constraints, Korean film has lately blossomed into a variegated body of work with consistently high production values and a notable willingness to address social inequities, overlooked histories, and gender politics (and, yes, the occasional propensity for extreme sexuality and violence).
By any measure, contemporary Korean cinema is thriving. At home, domestic films continue to compete with (and even out-perform) their Hollywood counterparts, notwithstanding a gradual relaxation of limits placed on imported films; abroad, Korean cinema has attained a status of cultural currency in international film festivals, arthouse cinemas, and the DVD market comparable with that of the other, hitherto more widely acclaimed cinemas of East Asia.
The New York Korean Film Festival, now in its sixth year, not only offers an experience of contemporary Korean cinema in bulk, but also reaches beyond the genres usually graced by film fests and cult video stores. This year’s festival, like those of years past, showcases a number of major martial arts costume pictures, thrillers, and animated films (this year: Forbidden Quest, A-rang, and Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles respectively), but it also provides a unique insight into more common, even popular, but less internationally lauded samples: romantic comedies, youth films, and social dramas. This year’s festival also looks back on the career of one of Korean cinema’s masters, the director Lee Man-hee, with a retrospective of a handful of his films, resuscitating a body of work rarely viewed in this country.
Introduction by Leo Goldsmith
Films
A Road to Return / 07 September
Lee Man-hee’s film is a small masterpiece, subtly suggesting the pain and distress of post-war Korea through a woman trapped not so much by her physical surroundings as by the impenetrable boundaries of her mind.
My Scary Girl / 07 September
My Scary Girl isn’t an art film; it’s a twisted, complex piece of popular entertainment. Maybe it is something similarly weird and fun that will break the HD barrier in the West, and finally make this cheap technology a lucrative and viable moviemaking option.
The Aggressives / 07 September
The Aggressives falls soundly into the realm of films like The Karate Kid, BMX Bandits, Gleaming the Cube, and this year’s Step Up, films that not only carry with them the dramatic conventions of youth culture, proving that it’s hard out there for a pimply teenager, but also situate their dramas in the milieu and fashion of a popular (usually athletic) trend.
When Romance Meets Destiny / 07 September
When Romance Meets Destiny is fairly buoyant, yet more engaging than the presently deflated romantic comedy genre, which – at least in Hollywood – seems lately besotted with unruly, frattish bachelors and uninspired dialogue.
If You Were Me: Anima Vision / 07 September
While the film is unlikely to single-handedly launch the careers of its contributors into stardom, If You Were Me: Anima Vision nonetheless gives international audiences a sense of the variety of animation in contemporary South Korea.
Rules of Dating / 07 September
The script and impressive acting from Park He-il and the tiny, beautiful Kang Hye-jeong both portray a devastating scenario. But the editing, music, and design of the film suggest something completely different: that these two people are simply having an innocent love affair.
Grain in Ear / 07 September
Like Jarmusch and Jia, Zhang withholds from the audience a direct look at the ugliness of his film’s world and is therefore able to sustain this tone through the film’s most brutal events without veering too deeply into melancholy. The result is a minor miracle of a film, one that steadily builds hardships onto its protagonist with the most feather-light melodrama.
