Kim Ji-woon (김지운)

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  BFI London Film Festival 2012
  2012/09/27, Source,
  Written by WKB on September 27, 2012 in Arts, Worldwide Korea Bloggers * This post is written by Korean Class Massive, one of the Korea Blog's Worldwide Korea Bloggers. The Olympic fever is well and truly over, the London transport seems to be back to it's miserable self and the weather is getting chilly. But before we go all woe with thee, next month sees the 56th BFI London Film Festival!!! The festival ran through 10 October to 21 October and these 12 days have been crammed with over 200 films from all over the world! Of course being Korean Class MASSIVE, we thought we would let you know about the latest Korean cinema offerings here in our capital city! There are a total of 6 films from South Korea this year and heres a quick low down: (all images and info courtsey of BFI),...More

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  All Eyes on Korea: consistent investment in the performing arts brings its rewards
  2012/09/09, Source,
  The London 2012 Olympics was around a decade in the making: preparation of the bid, building the venue itself and putting in place the infrastructure required to run a successful games. And for the last couple of years of that preparation time, a separate team of hard-working organisers from the Korean Ministry of Culture Sports and Tourism were planning their own spectacle. Led from the Korean Cultural Centre in London (KCCUK), the plan was to showcase the best of Korean culture to the huge numbers of international visitors who would be in London for the Games. Preparation and persistence builds relations with audiences and venues Taking the theme of the five Olympic rings as a starting point, and linking in with the traditional Korean five directions, five elements and five colours, the event was branded in Korean 오색찬란!!, loosely translated as "Five Colours Shining Bright!". For the consumption of Londoners the festival was branded All Eyes on Korea – a one hundred day festival of K-everything: music, art and literature, film, food and lectures. Posters with colourful Ks could be found across the Underground network publicising the initiative in a memorable way. One of London's famous red Routemaster buses was even pressed into service to promote the initiative. A London bus announced the start of the festival (photo courtesy of KCCUK). Planning for All Eyes on Korea had started at least two years beforehand, ambition fuelled by a good relationship with London's City Hall. This had been getting stronger over the years with Korea's participation in the Mayor's Thames Festival, a two-day open air festival of culture held on the banks of the Thames to mark the end of summer (conveniently for Koreans, at Chuseok time), in which the Korean Village has become an anchor tenant. This status reflects the investment the KCCUK has consistently made in the Festival each year, building upon percussion group Dulsori's initial private sector initiative in 2007, and introducing new ideas such as participation in the Rivers of the World project. Similarly the KCCUK's experience in dealing with London's top artistic venues such as the Barbican and the South Bank Centre has undoubtedly been of assistance in pulling together such a demanding and varied programme of events. And the promotion of Korean cultural events over the years, especially for example with the high-profile appearance of three big-ticket Korean acts in the Edinburgh International Festival last year (the Seoul Philharmonic, AHN Eun-mi's dance company and OH Tae-seok's theatre company), has undoubtedly helped in building and educating an audience ready for more,...More

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  [HanCinema's Film Talk] Robots and Technology: What does Kim Ji-woon fear for the future of Korea?
  2012/09/01,
  "All these stories originate from the earth. From the very earth you live on". That is the final line of the official description of the omnibus film "Doomsday Book". The film contains three stories of how mankind would perhaps bring about its own apocalypse. In Kim Ji-woon's "Creation of Heaven" this theme of self-destruction is placed against the backdrop of technological advancement as a product of human effort and imagination. In Kim's version, mankind's fall seems to share its destiny with technological advancement, all the while asking hard questions on issues of morality, spirituality, and being in the near future. The film contains some heated dialogues (though experienced more like monologues) of lengthy popular rhetoric over mankind's perceived power of its creations. All the while the robot(s) in question remains silent and appears to just be processing all that was being said. 'RU-4' is his serial number, but that's not what the Buddhist believers at the temple would call him. They would claim him as Buddha himself reborn, his nirvana achieved and form found in this 'defective' robot/android,...More

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  [HanCinema's Film Review] "Doomsday Book": The Korean Apocalypse
  2012/09/01,
  Film: "Doomsday Book" Directors: Lim Pil-seong & Kim Ji-woon Chapters: "The New Generation", "Happy Birthday", and "Heaven's Creation" Stars: Ko Joon-hee, Ryoo Seong-beom, Park Hae-il, Kim Kang-woo, Song Yeong-I Review Score: 7/10 Also Try: "Romantic Heaven", "Sorry, Thanks", and "Horror Stories" The inclusion of omnibus films within popular Korean cinema seems to me to be a curious phenomenon. Recent films such as "Romantic Heaven", "Sorry, Thanks", and "Horror Stories" have shown that there is interest for these more compact modes of storytelling. Still, there presence within contemporary Korean cinema suggests a possible niche or gap in the market that filmmakers such as Kim Ji-woon ("I Saw the Devil" and "A Bittersweet Life") and Lim Pil-seong ("Hansel and Gretel" and "Antarctic Journal") are willing to gamble on,...More