But critics fear international success could leave Korean films indistinct
June 16, 2006 - For years, auteur directors and their distributors in Korea cleverly used the foreign media and the circuits of major international festivals to attract publicity.
Jang Sun-woo's
Lies, a film about an affair between a teenage girl and a middle-aged artist, was show in Venice in 1999, giving it the publicity to stir up controversy at home about the film's pornographic content.
Kim Dong-wan's "Repatriation", a documentary about North Korean "unconverted prisoners", had its world premier at Sundance before it hit an art house theater in Seoul;
Hong Sang-soo's "Woman is the Future of Man" was screened at Cannes before its local premiere in 2004; "The Unforgiven", by Yon Jong-bin, also recently held a Cannes screening to compensate for its disgrace after being sued by the Ministry of Defense for openly criticizing the Korean army. The list goes on.
Yet the irony is that many of these auteur-independent films cannot be found in Korean video stores. Some don't even make it to screenings in regular theaters. In fact, many auteur film directors in Korea say the local market promotes a distribution network that makes it increasingly difficult for directors to survive, leading them to rely more on international festival circuits and foreign investment. That is, if your name isn't
Park Chan-wook, famous for "Old Boy", or
Bong Joon-ho, the director of "Memories of Murder".
An article in the International Herald Tribune by Sonya Kolesnikov-Jessop recently described a similar problem for Asian filmmakers in their native countries: They increasingly have problems "connecting with their ...
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