The first-ever Korean film, Righteous Revenge, premiered to an eagerly anticipating audience in the theater in what is now the Jong-ro area in 1919. Earlier that year, in March, there was a nationwide campaign against Japanese rule, which lasted from 1910 to 1945, when Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender to the allied forces after the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Very little is known about the film, except that it was part of a stage play, the plot of which revolves around a young male character whose family fortune is threatened by his evil stepmother. The film served as a secondary device to the play, inserted in the middle of the performance to aid plot development. This humble beginning of Korean cinema, however, almost prophetically contains a sign of what was to come for the next century. Righteous Revenge was born in the context of colonial rule, imbued with suspicions of imported modernity, raising questions about the authenticity of Korean cinema within Korean history. Questions such as ‘What is Korean cinema?’ and ‘What is its particular voice?’ lingered from that point on for a long time.

Fast forward to the Academy Award ceremony in 2019, where Bong Joon-ho won in the Best Picture category with Parasite. The shock reverberates in the hearts of fans of his films. Nobody saw this coming. Yet, as if to wash away the last of the tiniest particles of the bitter past when Korean cinema was regarded as peripheral, Bong stood tall on the stage and received his award, quoting Martin Scorsese.

 The impression his reception of one of the most prestigious awards in the film industry made was clear. Korean cinema is now up there with the world’s top contenders. Some cynics might retort that one film cannot make such a change possible. That’s true to a certain extent. Apart from a handful of films much-loved in the circuit of world cinema and international film festivals, the majority of Korean films still dwell in the shadow of giants, only emerging now and then on the international stage packaged as Korean horror or Asian Extremes, which often surpass the gore levels of even the scariest horror movies. Is this all Korean cinema can offer to the international audience? Is this the final destination of the one hundred-year history of Korean cinema that has long sought its own voice?

Korean cinema is more than blood splashes in fights between rival gangs vying to rule the underworld of Seoul, thinly veiled under the glitz of Gangnam style. The Korean audience has blissfully been watching a melodrama of a female prisoner on probation falling in love with a stranger on the train, Korean westerns set in Manchuria, an adaptation from a novel primarily focusing on couples struggling in snow, a thriller comedy where the office boss is possibly an alien, and Korean blockbuster films, some of which outperform Hollywood imports at the box office. They all contribute to the unique landscape of Korean cinema and deserve recognition, highlighting their significance as we expand the horizon of Korean cinema. The question of what Korean cinema remains relevant, and this blog is an attempt to answer that question by exploring those movies, or aspects of movies, we may not have noticed yet.