When Korean Cinema Attacks! - New York Korean Film Festival 2001

August 17-26, 2001 at Anthology Film Archives
co-presented with Korean Film Forum and Samsung Electronics

The most popular movies in the world right now are from Korea. They dominate the Korean box office, scoop up awards at international festivals, run for months in Europe, and win acclaim and audiences in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Taipei. And what country has missed the boat? Starts with an "A" ends with a "merica."

Only a handful of companies have released Korean films in the US and, mistakenly marketed as Hong Kong action pictures (or as benign exotica), they were received coldly. The greatest strength of Korean filmmakers is that they have remembered something American entertainment conglomerates have forgotten: sincerity. Korean movies scream their throats raw, whisper urgently in your ear, they grab your hand as they go down for a third time, they bypass your brain and go straight for you gut. They are the last will and testament of humanity on an industrialized planet, choked with smog, ruled by corporations.

And they’re a hell of a lot of fun. The line between art film and blockbuster is torched, so a movie like MEMENTO MORI can elicit shrieks from a sexed-up teen audience at the same time that it’s cauterizing that wound on your heart. THE ISLE is an arthouse horror flick that lauds obsessive devotion while having its heroine emerge from a toilet. JOINT SECURITY AREA is the APOCALYPSE NOW of Korean border tensions, but the characters are recognizably human, not shell-shocked allegories.

Korean movies are living movies. They are breathing movies. They are kicking, screaming, bleeding, cussing, milk-squirting-out-your-nose movies. They are a boot camp for your heart, and an acid test for your tolerance of human beings in all their messy, loopy, contradictory, maddening, messed-up glory. These are the movies that have scored at film festivals and in markets everywhere around the world, but in America. This is the film industry that the MPA has tried to destroy. And WHEN KOREAN CINEMA ATTACKS! is an attempt to let Americans see a wide cross-section of Korean movies and decide for themselves: are Americans ready for an antidote to shallow irony?

Films
AN AFFAIR (1998)
ART MUSEUM BY THE ZOO (1998)
ATTACK THE GAS STATION (1999)
BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE (2000)
CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST (1998)
THE FOUL KING (2000)
THE ISLE (2000)
JOINT SECURITY AREA (2000)
MEMENTO MORI (1999)
MY HEART (1999)
TELL ME SOMETHING (1999)