Theme: South Korean Cinema

South Korean Cinema has been with us since the 1920s. Domestic films gained a popularity from the 1950s through to the 1970s. There were many films made during this period but few that concern us here.

The South Korean cinema that we have today began in the 1990s – what is called New Korean Cinema. Thanks to government subsidies to create works that promoted the country’s culture and back emerging talents, filmmaking began to take off in dynamic ways. Throughout the 1990s, Korea was vigorous in adopting film genres from other cultures – the hard-boiled Hong Kong action film, the Japanese ghost story and the romantic film. There has been quite a respectable body of genre works to emerge from South Korean cinema.

Key Korean genre directors include , , , , and .