Korea 8
Oldboy Restored
By Jonathan Clements. After a drunken night on the town in Seoul, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) just wants to get home and give his daughter her birthday present. But on the way … he simply disappears. In the ensuing 15 years, he is drugged, hypnotised and locked in a single room. He fails in an […]
Early Korean Cinema
by Jeremy Clarke. This month, BFI Southbank and the Korean Cultural Centre UK are mounting a season of films from Korea made up to and including 1946 under the moniker Early Korean Cinema: Lost Films From The Japanese Occupation Period. The season is curated by KCCUK’s Hyun Jin Cho and University of Sheffield’s Kate Taylor-Jones.
The Shower
By Andrew Osmond. The Shower is a 48-minute Korean animated film screening this coming Saturday (3rd November) as part of the London Korean Film Festival. The venue is the Phoenix Cinema at noon, and tickets are available here. It depicts an encounter between two young children, a boy and girl teetering on adolescence in a […]
The Handmaiden
by Jeremy Clarke. Weighing in at a lengthy two and a half hours, this lavish, sexually-explicit, South Korean pot-boiler is based on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, but moves the location from Victorian England to Japanese colonial-era Korea.
Seoul Station
By Andrew Osmond. It’s not unknown for live-action films to have “companion” films in animation, usually made as spin-offs. The classic case is The Animatrix, a Japanese-Korean anthology made to tie in with The Matrix Reloaded, and the better of the two. Another anime anthology, Batman: Gotham Knight was theoretically tied in with The Dark […]