About Koreanfilm.org
A short introduction to me and this site:
This project began as a hobby. After having lived in Korea for a year or so, I started working a few hours a week at the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation (since renamed KOFIC -- the Korean Film Council), doing language editing. I had been interested in Korean film before, but working at the KMPPC gave me more access to information about Korean cinema, and I began to get a feel for the overall shape of the industry. Nonetheless, when I searched the web for more information in English about Korean film, there was practically nothing there. Not being someone to let ignorance or a lack of qualifications stand in my way, I decided one night to make a website myself. I never suspected it would grow so big.
Some background information about me: I'm from the U.S. originally (a small town in western Massachusetts), and I came to Korea straight out of graduate school in August 1997. While a student, I studied Russian language at Carleton College (Minnesota) and then at Indiana University. I was planning to get a Ph.D. in Russian Literature -- drama and translation interested me in particular -- but eventually I changed my mind and switched into a masters program in Applied Linguistics, so that I could live abroad and teach English. My stay in Korea was planned as a one or two year stop on the way to Eastern Europe, but it has since evolved into something more permanent... About six months after coming to Korea I met my wife Hyeon-sook. We dated for about three years before getting married on January 14, 2001. Hyeon-sook has been a great help to me in many ways, both with film-related work and with life in general. She currently operates an online DVD shop at YeonDVD.com.
I first became interested in Korean film, and the culture in general, through some close Korean friends I met in graduate school. It was they who convinced me to come to Korea instead of Japan, and I was lucky enough to get a job teaching English language at the alma mater of some old friends (Korea University). I taught there for four years in total, before taking a job as Korea correspondent for Screen International, a British film trade magazine.
I've become involved in other jobs as well. My wife and I sometimes work together to translate subtitles for Korean films, in addition to the subtitle editing/proofreading I do for the Korean Film Council. Since 2002, I have also served as a programme consultant for the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy (the picture of my wife and I above was taken in Udine). I assist in programming their selection of Korean films -- usually 8-12 contemporary titles per year -- and in 2003 I organized a special screening of seven Korean films from the 1960s.
People sometimes ask me which film or director ignited my interest in Korean film. Actually, I first became interested in Koreans' enthusiasm for cinema, rather than with any particular director or movie. In talking with my students or attending the Pusan Film Festival, I could sense the culture's love of cinema (while studying in Moscow during the early 1990s I felt the same enthusiasm for theatre and classical music). The first films which drew my interest were Christmas in August, Push! Push!, No. 3, and The Lovers of Woomook-baemi.
I also get asked often about my Korean language skills. I'm not completely fluent, but my wife and I speak mostly Korean at home, so I get a lot of practice. Formal Korean, jokes and archaic language are often over my head!
I started assembling this website in January 1999 and it first went up around the beginning of April that year. I began with just the '1998' and '1999' pages, and sent out the first newsletter about a month later. In late summer it became part of the Yahoo! directory, and the number of visitors surged overnight. Since then the site has steadily expanded, much faster than I anticipated. In April 2000 I got the site its own domain name. I've also been lucky to find people who have contributed reviews or essays -- without them, maintaining this site would be a tremendous challenge (see a partial list of profiles below).
There is a wide spectrum of people who visit this site. It's difficult to tell the exact composition of the visitors, but many countries are represented. There seems to be particular interest among several groups: (a) the Korean-American community; (b) viewers throughout Asia, particularly in Singapore, Hong Kong and other southeast Asian countries (where Korean music and TV dramas have become quite popular); (c) fans of Asian cinema in general from Europe and North America; (d) students from Korea studying abroad; and (e) people working in the film industry and in academia. It's been interesting to hear from such a wide variety of people interested in Korean cinema, and it appears that the audience for Korean movies will continue to grow.
For my long term goals, I hope to continue working on this site, and to do writing and other work related to film. I'd like to write a book someday on the history of Korean cinema, though I'm not sure yet what form it would take. It's hard to predict if we will stay in Korea long-term, or if at some point we will move somewhere else, but I imagine I'll continue to be involved in Korean film wherever I end up.
I still have many plans for this site, but given the amount of other work I do, I've had to settle for fairly slow progress. Feel free to email me if you have any comments or contributions, but please forgive me if it takes me a long time to answer... This site generates a huge amount of email, and it's a real struggle to keep up sometimes.
Contributors
Kyu Hyun Kim spent a nerdish but happy childhood and high school days in Seoul. He still remembers scenes and music from his first theatrical film experience, Thunderball. Blessed with parents who were confirmed film fans, Kyu Hyun has developed a lifelong affinity (perhaps obsession?) with genre cinema, especially horror, science fiction and film noir.
When he was nineteen, he transferred to an American university. Embarking on an academic career, he gravitated toward another lifelong fascination of his, Japanese culture and history. He ended up receiving a Ph.D. degree in Japanese history. His book on nineteenth century Japan entitled The Age of Visions and Arguments will be published from Harvard University Press in Spring/Fall 2005. He has also written several essays on Japanese history and culture, including one on the gender ambiguities in Japanese animation.
Kyu Hyun is extremely grateful to Darcy Paquet and www.Koreanfilm.org as well as a series of recent Korean films (Ryu Seung-wan's Die Bad and Pak Chan-wook's Joint Security Area remain personal favorites) for reviving his long dormant interest in Korean cinema. He promises to devote more energy and time to the exploration of Korean cinema, past, present and future, and wishes to author more than one scholarly book on the subject in the coming years.
Kyu Hyun currently teaches Japanese and Korean history and Japanese popular culture at University of California, Davis. He lives in a small but cozy apartment with his wife Young Mi Angela Pak, a feminist ethicist and Catholic/interfaith spiritual caregiver, and a beautiful salt-and-pepper cat, whose name must remain secret for now.
Adam Hartzell
Adam Hartzell grew up in a little patch of suburbia southwest of Cleveland, Ohio called Berea (rhymes with Korea). He attended Washington University in Saint Louis where he majored in Psychology with a minor in Writing on route to a Masters in Social Work at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work also at Wash U. Upon completing an internship at University of California, Berkeley as a psychotherapist for undergraduate and graduate students, he took a gander at his student loan debt. Whereupon he immediately experienced financial panic and sought professional help of his own. He eventually decided to seek solace in the San Francisco cliche of a software company while continuing with his writing.
Deeply concerned about Korean Cinema not receiving its due propers, he began focusing his writing on Korean Cinema in 1999, having been impressed with Park Chul-soo's 301-302 years earlier and stumbling into retrospectives on Jang Sun-woo and Im Kwon-taek at two of San Francisco's many wonderful film festivals. Then the power of Hong Sangsoo's oeuvre anchored him to Korean Cinema for good. He has been a contributing writer here at Koreanfilm.org since 2000 where he also manages the bibliography. His work appears regularly in Rick Curnette, Jr.'s The Film Journal (www.thefilmjournal.com). Recent print publications include a chapter on Hong Sangsoo's The Power of Kangwon Province in The Cinema of Japan and Korea, published in England by Wallflower Press and in the United States through Columbia University Press; and an article on the omnibus human rights film If You Were Me in Kyoto Journal, published in January 2005.
Tom Giammarco
Tom writes: "I was born in North Providence, Rhode Island, the fifth of my parents' seven children. My entire family still lives there -- all within a 20 minute drive of each other. I was the only one with the urge to see other parts of the world and I decided, after I graduated college, to join the Peace Corps. I was sent to Malawi in Africa as an 'Aquaculture Extension Agent' which is just a fancy way to say I was teaching fish farming. After that, I did 2 years of volunteer teaching --one year in Kingston, Jamaica and another in Leone, American Samoa.
After taking a couple of years to continue my education at a small, liberal college in Olympia, Washington, I jumped at the chance when offered a teaching position in South Korea. In July, 1995 I packed my bags for Iksan in North Cholla Province. I eventually was offered a position as an instructor at Woosuk University in Samrye (a small, 4-street village between Iksan and Jeonju) in 1997 and was promoted to the position of professor in 2000.
"I had always been interested in movies and the first time I stepped into the video store in Korea, I realized that I had a unique opportunity to explore a whole new world of cinema. They had hundreds of movies I had never heard of and I decided I wanted to see them all--even though I was just off the plane and couldn't understand a word of what was being said in the films. Among the first movies I saw in the theater was Jang Sun-woo's A Petal and that powerful movie turned my hobby into a love-affair with Korean films. I became especially interested in older Korean films, the history of Korean cinema and the people behind the making of the films. Recently, I began a course of study that (hopefully) will lead me to a doctorate in Korean Cinema."
Davide Cazzaro
Davide Cazzaro is a film researcher living in Venice. He recently graduated from the Universita' Ca' Foscari di Venezia in the department of Visual and Performing Arts with a dissertation on contemporary Korean Cinema (The Golden Age of South Korean cinema 1996-2002).
The first Korean movie he saw was The Isle by Kim Ki-duk at the Venice Film Festival in 2000. He attended the "famous" press screening that was suddenly interrupted because two female journalists fainted... In 2001 he began collaboration with www.cinemacoreano.it, the first and only Italian website entirely dedicated to Korean cinema. It took a couple of years and tons of hours of work, but now the website is recognized quite well. Currently he co-manages it together with the founder, Gianluca Gibilaro.
He first came to South Korea in November 2002 for the 7th Pusan International Film Festival. Since then he has returned several other times in order to research contemporary Korean cinema and to attend the Pusan, Puchon, and Jeonju festivals as a press member.
He's currently working for the Pesaro International Film Festival as Korea correspondent and coordinator of the 2005 retrospective at the festival. He enjoys very much visiting and contributing to Koreanfilm.org (even if he'd like to have time to write more...) and he's very grateful to Darcy Paquet for his kind help and cooperation.
Paolo Bertolin
Paolo Bertolin likes to think of himself as a displaced wanderer who still hasn't found where his heart is: San Francisco? Bologna (Italy)? Seoul? Jakarta? Taipei?... Mainly focusing his interest on Asian cinemas, he's been providing contributions to various Italian magazines, newspapers and websites, such as Cineforum and Il manifesto, as well as to international media, such as The Korea Times and The Jakarta Post. In 2004, he was a trainee of Fipresci (the International Federation of Film Critics) at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, as selected in a competition open to young film critics from all over the world.
Rather than bore you with a detailed curriculum vitae he prefers to provide you with a somewhat random list of twenty-five non-Korean films from the post-2000, thinking this would help you to know him better: The Afternoon of a Torturer (Lucian Pintilie), La Captive (Chantal Akerman), La Cienaga (Lucrecia Martel), Clous of May (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), Elephant (Gus Van Sant), Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz), Hotaru (Kawase Naomi), Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese), Gostanza da Libbiano (Paolo Benvenuti), Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien), My Mother's Smile (Marco Bellocchio), A Poet (Garin Nugroho), Porto of My Childhood (Manoel De Oliveira), S21: The Khmer Rouge Death-Machine (Rithy Panh), Shadow Kill (Adoor Gopalakrishnan), The Son (Luc e Jean-Pierre Dardenne), Such Is Life (Arturo Ripstein), Under the Sand (Francois Ozon), Taboo (Oshima Nagisa), To the Left of the Father (Luiz Fernando Carvalho), Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-ke), Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr), What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang), Yi Yi (Edward Yang).
Boris Trbic
Boris Trbic is a Melbourne writer and film reviewer. He has been publishing in Metro, Screen Education, sensesofcinema.com, and various U.S., Korean and New Zealand magazines.
Boris is a regular reviewer on Melbourne's 3RRR Film Buffs' Forecast and has been working as a member of the Documentary Panel at the Melbourne International Film Festival. He also writes short fiction and occasional pieces about oriental carpets.
Adrien Gombeaud
Adrien Gombeaud is a journalist living in Paris. His work apears in the monthly film review Positif, in the daily paper Les Echos and in the special issues of the weekly Paris Match.
He also posts a column with Darcy and Variety critic Derek Elley in the Korean film review Cine21. He visits Koreanfilm.org daily and enjoys the board under the name of AdrienG.
Lalit Rao
Male 31 yrs old based in New Delhi, India (pictured right with Mr. Kim Dong-ho). B.A. (English Literature) and M.A. (French) translation & interpretation, M.A. dissertation titled "La traduction cinematographique: Les metiers du doublage et du sous-titrage." I translate my own cinema articles in French.
I write for an Indian film journal called "Deep Focus", and I am the Indian correspondent of the French web site on cinema called "Objectif-cinema." Apart from English, I speak French, German languages. I attend all the major film festivals in India. Last South Korean film seen was Old Boy by Park Chan-wook.
I am interested in "serious cinema" from all over the world. My top 10 films are:
1. And Life Goes On... (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992),
2. The Cyclist (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1987),
3. Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1976),
4. Ladri di Biciclette (Vittorio de Sica, 1948),
5. Ballad of a Soldier (Grigori Chukhrai, 1959),
6. La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954),
7. Commissar (Alexander Askoldov, 1967),
8. Red Psalm (Miklos Jancso, 1971),
9. La Regle du Jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939),
10. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958).
Nils Clauss
Nils Clauss is a freelance writer and photographer who received an MA in Visual Culture at Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) in 2005.
Between November 2003 and February 2004 he spent three months in Hong Kong as a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Scholar to complete his final research on his Masters thesis. His thesis examines how the characters in Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together relate to space. Specifically, he seeks a connection between space and the identity issues of people in Hong Kong before 1997. During his university studies Nils worked mainly as a web designer for Humboldt University and as a freelance journalist.
The first Korean film Nils Clauss saw was Nowhere to Hide by Lee Myung-Se in 2000 during a year abroad in Australia at the Melbourne Film Festival. After that he became increasingly interested in Korean film and finally moved, because of his devotion to Korean cinema, to Seoul in November 2005. Right now, through the support of a scholarship by the Korea Foundation, he is spending most of his time learning Korean at Korea University. On the side he is going to shoot a documentary film on Korean cinema. You can also find further information on his website at www.kotau.com.