First steps
In 1923, the first Korean film, Promise of Love Under the Moon, was released. However, Korean cinema remained for a long time in the shadow of its Japanese neighbor. Crushed by the occupiers until liberation, then completely destroyed by the war, it was then muzzled by dictatorships. The 7th Korean art is then mainly realistic, see Yu Hyeon-mok and his A Lost Bullet (1961), a film noir about the uneasiness of former soldiers after the war, which is the perfect expression of it. The revival came in the 1980s, when a rather committed cinema appeared, as did literature, from which it was often adapted. This renaissance even led to international recognition, especially from the 1990s onwards. One example is the Korean director Bae Yong-gyun and his film Why did Bodhidharma go to the East? (1989), about the reflections and daily life of three monks, an old man, a man in his thirties and a child, living in a remote hermitage. Why did Bodhidharma go to the East? is one of the first Korean films to win awards in the West, notably at the Locarno festival the same year. Im Kwon-taek's films also marked the revival of Korean cinema in the 1980s. He directed Mandala (1980, awarded in Berlin), The Surrogate Mother (1986, awarded at the Venice Film Festival) and Sopyonje (1993), an absolute masterpiece about a family of Pansori singers. The filmmaker won critical acclaim in 2000 and 2003 at the Cannes Film Festival for his last two films, the much licked Le Chant de la fidèle Chunhyang and Ivre de femmes et de peinture.
The 1990s and 2000s
The late 1990s brought a wave of innovative and talented young directors. Almost all of them are preoccupied with daily life, the difficulties of modern life, and some express the absurdity of our condition through elaborate structures reminiscent of the New Wave. Director Hong Sang-soo, one of the most promising representatives of this period, was selected several times in various categories at the Cannes Film Festival, notably for his films The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) and A Tale of Cinema (2005), and Hahaha (2010), which won the Prize in the section Un certain regard. We notice, among some directors, a desire to retranscribe reality in a more poetic way. Among the latter, let's mention Hur Jin-ho's very pretty Palwolui Christmas(Christmas in August). The writer and critic Lee Chang-dong, who was at one time Minister of Culture, has had a great commercial and deserved critical success for his films Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002). The latter revisits contemporary history with an interesting flashback system. In 2004, Old Boy by director Park Chan-wook won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, marking the first major consecration for South Korean cinema. This film, with its all manner of violence and choreography, was, unsurprisingly, particularly pleasing to the president of the jury of this edition, Quentin Tarantino. Among the masters in the art of provocation, director Kim Ki-duk succeeds in overturning the healthy and bland image of Korean cinema by instilling in it some very critical pearls about its society, its morals and the conservatism of its elites. Among these raw, harsh but often accurate films are L'île (2000, selected at the Venice Film Festival), Printemps, été, automne, hiver... et printemps (2002) and more recently One on One (2014) and Entre deux rives (2016). Let's also mention the filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, his film Pieta, which won him the award for Best Director at the 2012 Venice Film Festival.
Nowadays
In recent years, South Korean cinema has been divided between mainstream films that are very Hollywood in their making (but not always interesting like Shiri, JSA, The Friends, and many spy films between the two Koreas) and true genre masterpieces. This cinema, probably the most promising in Asia, is led by directors such as Bong Joon-ho, the most famous South Korean filmmaker of the last five years. Bong Joon-ho began his career in the early 2000s, with works such as Barking Dog (2000) and Memories of Murder (2003), inspired by the true story of a serial killer. In 2006, the Korean director directed The Host, which Les Cahiers du Cinéma ranked third most important film in their ranking. Two years later, he teamed up with renowned directors Leos Carax and Michel Gondry for the film Tokyo! a feature-length film composed of several shorts placing their plot in the eponymous city. In 2013, he had a very American cast (Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris...) for the film Le Transperceneige, an adaptation of the French comic strip of the same name. In 2017, his work Okja is one of the five Korean films in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, alongside Hong Sang-soo's The Day After, which had the rare distinction of having two films presented during the prestigious festival. The ultimate consecration comes to Bong Joon-ho in 2019, with the disturbing Parasite, which not only won the Palme d'Or unanimously by the jury at the Cannes Film Festival that year, but also the Golden Globe and the César for Best Foreign Film, as well as four Oscars (including Best Director and Best Film) in 2020. South Korean cinema is therefore to be watched very closely, no doubt promising new works of great finesse and quality
On the small screen
South Korea's small screen is not short of quality programmes, and the Netflix streaming platform provides an important window for Korean television works. In recent years, for example, we have seen series such as My First First Love (2019), a remake of the South Korean series My First Time. This series has 2 seasons and will delight fans of K-pop (a style of Asian music very popular with teenagers), since its cast includes the singer Jung Chae-yeon (from the group DIA) as well as Jung Jin-young (from the group B1A4). The series Love Alarm (2019), Memories of the Alhambra (2018) and Kingdom (2019) are also worth mentioning. The latter places its plot during the Joseon period of Korean history, thus combining historical content with a zombie invasion.
