Acts I & II of Korean Film Craze
Lee Dahye
Reporter
Cine 21
The second act of the Korean film craze seems to be sweeping the United States. The first can be said to have been played by Korean movies, whereas the second was initiated in America.
The first act was pushed by Korean film directors who had the chance to direct movies in the US. In 2013, Park Chan-wook directed Stoker; Bong Joon-ho made Snowpiercer by casting Tilda Swinton, Chris Evans, and other American cast members along with Korean stars Song Kang-ho and Ko Asung; and Kim Jee-woon directed The Last Stand. Such directorial achievements were far from surprising. At the 66th Cannes Film Festival in 2013, when the jury was headed by American director Quentin Tarantino, Park received the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-most prestigious honor, for his movie Oldboy. Bong also drew attention when his blockbuster The Host was screened in the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section in 2006. From then on, the two directors saw their works premiere at American theaters. Production of American remakes of Korean movies also ensued. The US version of Il Mare (The Lake House) appeared in 2006, followed by those of My Sassy Girl and Into the Mirror (Mirrors) in 2008 and A Tale of Two Sisters (The Uninvited) in 2009. In 2017, Bong released Okja on Netflix, and the next year, Park directed the British TV series The Little Drummer Girl. Thus Park, Bong, and Kim, who debuted as directors between the first half of the 1990s and 2000, made inroads into the American market around the same time. The traditional path for Korean directors in the US. usually meant earning recognition at home and abroad by directing a genre movie, receiving rapturous reviews at international film festivals, especially in Cannes, and directing movies produced in America.
In 2016, Netflix began its service in Korea and initiated substantial investment in Korean TV series from the next year. Three major elements propelled the global distribution of Korean content like movies and TV series: Netflix, which provided such content with a worldwide distribution network; Bong’s Oscar-winning film Parasite; and COVID-19. In May 2019, only months before the outbreak of the pandemic, Bong earned the Palme d’Or, the highest prize at Cannes, for Parasite, making it the first Korean movie to earn that honor. The film was distributed around the world and enjoyed great popularity despite the “one-inch barrier” (subtitles) that annoyed American audiences. The film’s producers and distributors noticed the explosive response to Parasite in the initial stage of distribution and launched a campaign for its candidacy for an Academy Award. This initiative paid off and the film won four of the six Oscar categories it was nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film.
Shortly afterwards, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the virtual shutdown of movies theaters worldwide. This circumstance temporarily halted the burgeoning global expansion of Korean movies before Korean TV series began gaining attention via Netflix. Love Alarm, based on Chon Kye-young’s webtoon of the same title, attracted viewers in Asia, and Kim Eun-hee’s Kingdom wooed those in North America. And then came the global smash series Squid Game. To an extent, these achievements owe a debt to the moves of leading Korean directors, producers, and other film people toward OTT services amid the COVID-19-incurred contraction of the film industry.
The second act of the Korean film craze seems to stem from the narratives of Korean cinema produced in the United States. On May 11 last year, the movie Umma was released in Korea. The title is the phonetic transliteration of the Korean word for “Mommy.” This horror thriller portrays the soul of a dead mother who refuses to leave her daughter. Umma is directed by Iris Shim and stars Sandra Oh as the main character Amanda, both of whom are Americans of Korean descent. After Yang, the opening film at this year‘s Jeonju International Film Festival in Korea, also invited attention for a collaboration between director Kogonada and actor Justin H. Min, both Korean Americans. The series Pachinko, produced by and released on Apple TV+, is based on the novel of the same title by Korean American author Lee Min Jin, and stars Korean actors Youn Yuh-jung, Lee Min-ho and Kim Min-ha. In addition to movies created by Koreans, films on the history and lives of Koreans are being produced in America. Now that social distancing measures have finally ended, how will things for Korean content go from here? I await it with a flutter of excitement.
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