Hollywood takes notice as Korean films ‘surf’ K-culture wave

SEOUL: With K-pop and K- drama television series riding high across Asia and beyond, a trio of South Korean films with top billing at this year’s Cannes film festival also shows the country’s growing cinematic clout. Leading the pack is director Park Chan-Wook, whose period drama adapted from the British writer Sarah Waters’ erotic crime novel

Passionate fanbase

South Korea’s most successful cultural exports to date have been the K-pop songs and K- drama soap operas of the so- called “Hallyu,” or “Korean Wave,” which have swept the rest of Asia and beyond in the last 15 years.

Korean movies have had to work harder for mainstream foreign audiences, although they have passionate genre fan bases, especially for their highly-stylized—and often hyper-violent— crime and horror offerings.

Contemporary Korean cinema came of age with its own “New Wave” of directors who were involved in the tumultuous pro- democracy movements of the 1980s and 1990s against military rule.

Their neo-realist offerings were socially conscious and rooted in domestic culture and politics, especially the notion of a repressed and exploited underclass.

The movies of Park Chan-Wook, who was born in 1963, post-date the movement, but the director was heavily influenced by the upheavals he witnessed as a young man.

“I saw a lot of my friends taken away by the authorities and many were tortured,” Park said in a recent interview with .

“I saw them fight actively against the dictatorship and they suffered as a consequence. I didn’t take an active part and I felt guilty about this,” he said.

“I channelled this sense of guilt into my films.”