Jornal da Mostra
Nº 341 > 28ª Mostra > 21/07/2005
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Korean cinema expands without losing self-criticism
To declare that today the South Korean movie is one of the most successful and dynamic in the world doesn’t sound as any news. The South Korean feature film industry has increased in the last ten years and it occupies progressively the empty space left by the Hong Kong production. But it is interesting to take into consideration that the Koreans are not taken by the enthusiasm of the positive results and, despite the successes of many films inside and outside the country, it maintains a self-critic attitude in relation of its own productions.If on one hand they celebrate last year successes like Silmido, by Woo-Suk Kang, and Tae-Guk-Gi, by Je-gyu Kang (28ª Mostra), responsible for taking 1/4 of the country population (45 millions inhabitants) to the movie theaters, on the other hand they don’t hesitate in criticizing films that have disappointed the audience in 2004, like the horror movies productions, that, according the Korean Film Council, an entity of producers, directors and movie students, have driven away the audience with terrible plots and visual and sound effects of dubious quality.
During the end of the year balance, the directors of KFC also emphasized the importance of Tae-Guk-Gi film in breaking an old paradigm of the South Korean war movie anticommunist tendency. According to the entity annual report, the director Je-gyu Kang, skips from the typical pattern of films about the Korean war that, invariably portrayed patriots sacrificing their lives for the nation, always showing the South-Koreans as the good guys and the North-Koreans as the bad guys.
Another paradigm in the international Korean cinematography scaling is the cinema of Kim Ki-Duk (Bin Jip– 28º Mostra), whose artistic and disturbing movies have been accumulating awards in film festivals around the world.
