INTERVIEW DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN

Part I

Interview with Kim Han-min, director of War of the Arrows:
“It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film.”

“It was the one military practice, the one token of martial skill, which ever held its own among a people who for thousands of years have preferred silks, pictures, poems and music, the stately crane in the paddy fields and the knarled [sic] pine on the mountainside.”

—Historian J. L. Boots on Korean archery, from Korean Weapons and Armour
Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, December 1934

Having made it through to the semi-finals of the national championships, successful young target shooter Park Nam-joo is competing in a playoff against Olympic Gold medallist Yun Ok-hee. She can see the counter on the red timing clock ticking over fast. Her breathing is all wrong, so she tries to regain her rhythm. At full draw, arrow tethered and ready for release, the counter hits zero and she’s left staring in disbelief at the target . . . “She failed!” croak the announcers, pinpointing her rotten sense of timing in shootoffs. The tournament’s over for Park Nam-joo. Returning to her family, tear-stricken and breathing heavily, she presents her runners-up medal to a photograph of her missing thirteen year-old niece, a bright young thing who is lost and presumably drowned. Sobbing, pained, exhausted, the Park family unite behind Nam-joo in filial piety. “It’s bronze,” her brother says to the photograph, wiping aside his tears. “Bronze!” And then the weeping grandfather: “Your aunt brought you a . . .” his voice breaking, bone in his throat, “. . . a bronze medal.” Then follow hysterics and misery.

If it is widely known that archery is practically Korea’s national sport, it is also known that Korean coaches try not to do anything halfway. A New York Times article about the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008 gets right to the heart of it: “The South Korean women started Sunday by smashing the world record and then got what they really came to the Olympics to get, what they always come to get: the archery team gold.”

What they always come to get.

Park Hae-il, as master archer Nam-Yi, readies an arrow using a three finger under case grip in War of the Arrows

There is no reason why I should have spent time after my interview with director Kim Han-min thinking of this scene specifically. Set in the middle of the seventeenth century, when Chosŏn Korea was invaded by the Manchu for the second time in ten years, Kim’s propulsive, whiz-bang historical/action drama War of the Arrows has nothing to do with the national championships or target shooting in modern Korea. It instead condenses a savage and traumatic historical event into a punchy and poignant return-of-the-hero tale. But in its last few moments our conversation switched to the broader subject of Korean archery as tradition, and it is precisely because there was not enough time to get seriously into the thing that I left with this perspective.

Kim has said he considers the bow and arrow to be the vital element of his film. It is a pitch I hear first hand in interview — “I wanted to make a historical drama which introduced and focused on the arrow and the bow” — and again later at the press screening where he fields questions from the audience. I had planned originally to de-emphasise this aspect of the film for our discussion, feeling that if War of the Arrows should be viewed as anything then it shouldn’t be as, primarily, a “bow and arrow movie” (especially in light of the marketing push). But then Kim observes, with some pride, that like thousands of other children in South Korea he was taught archery in his junior years (archery is taught at elementary school, high-school and college level by designated coaches who spend between three and six months running drills); that the sound of an arrow striking its target left an indelible impression on him — and with that he cuts right through the one-dimensional note of the marketing message and has my attention.

This exciting contemporary form, he says, is directly rooted in a long and excellent tradition which extends back to Chosŏn Korea. His assertion that “the arrow and bow is one of the [few] iconic symbols that hasn’t been severed from history,” in fact, pinpoints the thinking behind, among others, Yun Ok-hee’s own public attempts to promote the historical legacy of Korean archery. Yun, whose F.I.T.A. world ranking has floated consistently between first and third place since 2006, argues that the achievements of Korean archers in Olympic and world championships is evidence of this legacy: “Our sensitive fingertips handed down from our ancestors and our spiritual strength and willingness to fight to the very end are our secrets.” Set in this context, then, Kim’s film might even be viewed as a tribute.

Director Kim Han-min at the London Korean Cultural Centre (photo by me)

We’re holding the interview in the library corner of the Korean Cultural Centre at a time when the film’s total ticket sales are 450,000 shy of Sunny (Sseoni, 2011), the friendships-and-terminal-illness tale from writer-director Kang Hyung-chul which has mushroomed beyond anything we might have expected and currently holds the top spot for biggest domestic draw of the year. Within the month, War of the Arrows will pass the 7.4 million admissions mark, moving it safely out of the commercial blockbusters zone but still short of the sort of numbers racked up by the disaster phenomenon Haeundae (aka., Tidal Wave, 2009) and the 2008 sleeper comedy Scandal Makers (aka., Speed Scandal, Gwasokseukaendeul). But the train doesn’t stop there. At this point, Kim and his sales team are skilfully carving out an international platform for the film that will take it from London to the States, where it’s set to play in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas; to Canada where it’s confirmed in Toronto and Vancouver; and then back here for the festival stint where it opens the London Korean Film Festival in November.

Which is nice for Kim, and good for K.O.F.I.C., the state-supported organisation responsible for promoting Korean films abroad and supplying the majority of us in the west with information . . . But all of this has an effect on the realities of interviewing. With War of the Arrows imagery everywhere and PR staff politely hustling, Kim has the confidence and edge of a man who has turned a full-bore, 100-day long, multi-million dollar production into possibly the year’s single biggest attraction at the Korean multiplex. “The amount of pressure was immense,” admits the director. “I started filming in February this year and had to finish on June 9 for an August 10 release date.” While principal photography is usually shorter for Korean films — obviously this part of the production process was very much influenced by the unique aesthetic and technical demands, as well as economic factors, of the historical film; by contrast, typical productions can be turned around in well under twelve weeks — there is no question at all that War of the Arrows’ post-production period was alarmingly short, even with the benefits of Korea’s growing post-production services and industry. “It was an incredibly short period of time, it required very clear and succinct communication with a lot of different people. I received help from specialist members of staff and liaised with the special effects departments very closely. The pressure was huge, but I was very lucky to have met such good crew members this year — sometimes they came up with better ideas than me so this made things easier!” A Korea Times piece on War of the Arrows, published in August (‘Arrows aims for new horizons’), gives the impression that the film’s production budget was low; this is true of historical films produced in the globalised Hollywood system but not in the current Korean industry where lavish budgets on the scale of I Saw the Devil (Angmareul Boatda, 2010) are exceptionally rare. In 2010, the average production budget, excluding prints and advertising, was KW 1.42 billion (US$1.2 million); by contrast, Kim’s film, earmarked from the start as a big-budget historical production, cost KW 9 billion (US$8.5 million). I quote this information to Kim, primarily because it is worth getting confirmation on production budgets at every unusual opportunity but also because I want to test The Korea Times’ contention that a US$8-9 million budget should be restrictive at all in the current Korean film industry. Kim laughs. “There was nothing I couldn’t do with that money. If it was a bit more I could maybe have looked after the staff a bit better . . .”

Moon Chae-won as Ja-in, sister to Na-mi, on the day of her wedding

Kim seems to prefer writing and directing his own projects. Though he has worked with other screenwriters — on his short-film debut Sympathy (Yeonmin, 1998) and then again on his second feature, the occasionally daffy blackmail thriller Handphone (Haendeupon, 2009), written by Kim Mi-hyun — his self-authored output has performed more respectably at the box office and garnered local festival awards. To date he has written and directed the short films Sunflower Blues (1999) and Three Hungry Brothers (Galchiguidam, 2003), his feature debut Paradise Murdered, aka. Paradise 1986 (Geukrakdo Salinsageon, 2007), which made the top best selling films list in the year of its release, and of course War of the Arrows. “My first priority and main job is directing. It is a bit unfortunate that I can’t find a like-minded writer, I just end up doing the job myself . . . Strangely, the films where I’ve had another writer onboard, like Handphone, were not the ones that were commercially successful. I’ve been mulling that point over recently, to see what that’s about.”

Park Sol-mi as teacher Jang Gwi-nam — a role that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 2007 Blue Dragon Film Awards — in Kim Han-min’s debut feature Paradise Murdered (Geukradko Salinsageon, 2007) Jeong Yi-gyu (Park Yong-woo) pesters entertainment agency rep Oh Seung-min (Eom Tae-woong) in Handphone (Haendeupon, 2009)

Paradise Murdered and Handphone were received as “serious” thriller mysteries, attracting a more sophisticated audience than your typical adolescent, though on reflection both films surprise with their dark comic register. Consider one early sequence in Paradise Murdered. The surviving residents on Geukrak Island have all assembled in an empty schoolroom to discuss the recent murders of two locals and the unexplained disappearance of a third, Deok-su. En passant, Kim for no apparent reason inserts a gaggle of vignettes which would not look out of place in a Daffy Duck cartoon: an elasticised killer in wetsuit, white gloves and a snorkel tossing a bright red body-bag into the ocean; in the next, the same man seen from overhead, this time tunnelling out a six-foot burial plot for the tied-up, not-yet-dead corpse itching for freedom nearby; and the punchline has a pair of (apparently) conjoined rocks sprouting from the blue sea, a spiralling arrow pointing down towards them and the accompanying caption: “Deok-su’s ass.” Gamely overturning the dramatic pace and structure of the schoolroom scene in this manner, Kim flits schizophrenically between, on the one hand, suspenseful half-sinister debate and, on the other, the tempestuous exertions of an anonymous killer with all the wit and grace of a Chuck Jones villain. On the subject of Paradise Murdered, I ask about this scene and if, given that the entire film must bear his stamp as a writer-director, he feels that any of this madcap zaniness channels his personal idiosyncrasies. After hearing the translation, he belts out the sort of laugh which is probably heard at the far end of the building and maybe in reception too. Settling back with a broad, mischievous grin, he replies simply: “Most definitely yes.” But as he is prone to do on the publicity circuit he launches immediately into a direct question of his own, pointing to a scene in his new film — in which our dazed hero Nam-Yi (Park Hae-il), having engaged his prospective brother-in-law (Kim Mu-yeol) in a drunken, sprawling tavern fight, is compelled to yield, and then vomits all over his opponent’s face — and asking if it does roughly the same trick.

Moments earlier Kim asked another pointed question, this time about the different weapon systems used in his film by the Ch’ing and Chosŏn dynasty armies, and the subtle variations within these systems. He evidently enjoys asking the questions. More than being civil or reserved in interview, Kim seems genuinely interested in finding out what you have to say to him in this short, sharp time slot; not for nothing does he want to understand how well the film — its nationalist themes and archetypes — plays with an international audience: this is, lest we forget, the most well-publicised Korean blockbuster of the year. It’s an instinct which shines later at the festival press launch, where he implores a hundred journalists, embassy staff, hotel and theatre personnel, event organisers and excitable young film geeks to bring any film-specific questions right up to him in person once the grim, for being so formal, business of the onstage Q & A is over. To this end, he succeeds in charming the audience, speaking with a humility and confidence that engages us all, but I wonder how far any of this goes in serving his contention that War of the Arrows is “a deep and meaningful film.”

1 November, 2011

(cont’d)
Part II

INTERVIEW DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN

Part II

Interview with Kim Han-min, director of War of the Arrows:
“It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film”

Park Hae-il as the master archer Nam-Yi in War of the Arrows

Though little of this makes it into the final film, it is worth recalling the devastating impact of the Japanese invasions in the late sixteenth century. Intended to bring about the destabilisation of Ming China, this bitter war exposed the complacency of Chosŏn Korea, shocking the military leadership from its general malaise and arousing the ire of the elite classes (Confucianists and bureaucrats all) who demanded absolute immediate reform. Little changed, however, and the first Manchu invasion of 1627 exposed these weaknesses again. The second Manchu invasion of 1636-7 forced the Chosŏn state into a humiliating capitulation. It culminated finally in the establishment of tributary relations with the Ch’ing, thus ensuring Korean submission to China until remarkably well into the nineteenth century. Kim’s film draws on the almighty upheaval of this second invasion, and its interest, born of necessity, is in the spectacle not the story. In creating a resistance tale which turns on the promise of reunion between a brother (Nam-Yi) and sister (Ja-In, played by Moon Chae-won) separated by invasion, Kim shifts the narrative focus away from the Chosŏn state, its political structures and the collateral damage of war.

Despite this stripped-back, clipped-wing approach, his film touches on two key issues which make up for its curious love affair with the bow and arrow; both invite us to sympathise with its lead characters’ suffering on a personal as well as a political level. First, Ja-In and her fiancé are forced to make an impossible choice that damages irreparably their bond to the Korean nation-state. Second, the story of Nam-Yi, who is hell-bent on rescuing his sister from Prince Dorgon of the Ch’ing, negotiates the tension between ethnic difference and national identity.

Kim smiles when I broach the subject and he takes a moment. “Historically, Korea has frequently been invaded by the surrounding countries. At that point of suffering — where the people are oppressed and repressed — emerges a very determined spirit, a noble spirit. I wanted to create a simple story and drama, yet a powerful drama to convey this.” It is in this tension, this struggle between the oppressor and oppressed, the invader and prisoner-of-war, that War of the Arrows catches its most potent theme. The question that haunts Ja-In and other prisoners as they reach the Manchurian border — “Can we ever go back?” — reflects their deep-seated anxieties about the symbolic significance of crossing from one nation to the other. Here, border lines and identity are open questions. In one scene, as several hundred prisoners-of-war crawl along a hillside in the northern provinces, a high point-of-view shot shows the beauty of the wild and unprotected land they leave behind; treasures, as well as traditions, they are forced to abandon. In the film's closing stages the returning survivors, bloodied and exhausted, cross back into Korea not as heroes (who freed prisoners from servitude and almost certainly death), but as traitors, unprepared (and perhaps unfit) to die for their country. A coda claims there were no formal cases of repatriation.

Kim also stresses that many of his actors speak note-perfect Manchu, the official dynastic language, now endangered, of the Ch’ing which was seriously under threat as early as the eighteenth century. According to articles in China Daily, The New York Times and from Reuters a few dozen of the 10 million Manchu living in the north-eastern provinces and in Beijing today can speak the language fluently; Jin Yanshan, a delegate from Liaoning, explains it without any frills: “In my home village, the old people still use the odd word of Manchu, like for mother or father. That’s it. There is no environment for it.” Kim’s efforts to recover the language from the precious few primary schools and villages where it is still practised in north-east China lends some credibility to the claim that he is as much concerned with history and tradition as he is with arrows, gorge-jumping and Mexican stand-offs. Although little is made of the intercultural connection between Nam-Yi and his Manchurian arch rival, Jyu Shin-Ta (Ryoo Seung-yong), the merging of the two languages, Korean and Manchu, heightens the familial bond between the multilingual Nam-Yi and his sister (described as the “best archer in the Chosŏn dynasty” and “the beauty of the region” respectively in the English press book) with powerful reverberations. The film may verge towards generic convention here, but it draws attention to the demographic mixing of ethnic and social identities by expunging Nam-Yi and Ja-In’s “mysterious” mother from the narrative altogether. The subtext is as loud as the impact of one of Jyu Shin-Ta’s arrows.

Director Kim Han-min at the London Korean Cultural Centre (photo by me)

But in fulfilling the demand to make plot, genre and characterisation more transparent for new audiences, Kim admits to taking a step back and reducing to a minimum the things that originally interested him: this includes of course some of the nuances of traditional ground archery. Adds Kim on this point: “Unfortunately it slowed the rhythm of the film, so this element, this focus, had to be more succinct and simplified.” In its theatrical form, these matters are subordinate to the key melodramatic thrust of the film which deepens our understanding of Nam-Yi as an outsider: the film emphasises the unavoidable fact that, as the descendant of a national traitor, Nam-Yi too is considered with suspicion and contempt; also emphasised is a sense of personal failure on Nam-Yi’s part — his mission to rescue Ja-In from the Manchurian Prince becomes a sort of hysterical antidote, as well as an opportunity to both honour the memory of his father and fulfil his duty as Ja-In’s protector. Though Kim speaks earnestly about turning in a schematic, well-paced melodrama (with far greater narrative redundancy than either of his previous features), his concern for stating this point the right way is revealing when set against his obvious enthusiasm for both the historical period (a huge cinematic subject in its own right) and for the tactics of short- and long-range archery.

On a technical level also, Kim has good reason to feel dissatisfied with a key digital effects sequence. As the elite Niru troop led by Jyu Shin-Ta pursue our hero up a rocky mountainside and into a box canyon with seemingly nowhere to go, a wild tiger repels their attack, tearing ruthlessly into their number and permitting Nam-Yi’s escape. Though it is regrettable that the digital effects team, working to a tight post-production schedule, produced such a hollow series of rendered images in the finished film, the apparently risk-averse Dasepo Club and DCG Plus (production and investment management companies respectively) voiced concerns early on in production about the entire sequence, and tried holding Kim back from shooting it altogether. “That was a very contentious issue,” he admits. “It was technically very difficult because the funding companies and investors were against it. But for me as the director, the thought of not having the tiger appearing in this picture, on the mountain top, was just ridiculous.” Indeed, the whole set-piece allows Kim to extend thematic connections of importance to his commentary on traditional virtue and morality. As elsewhere in East Asia, most obviously China, the tiger is a symbol of virtue and righteousness; in Korean folk belief specifically, the tiger has supernatural attributes connecting it to the Mountain Spirit; and in rituals, paintings and other art objects, it is portrayed as a mountain god, a sacred guardian, to which the oppressed, needy and diseased do turn. In the film, the scene’s sting-in-the-tail ending succeeds in unnerving Jyu Shin-Ta and the surviving men in his troop: the tiger’s attack on the Niro suggests that their ghoulish fate is just. So the scene is of importance not for its computer-generated, Gladiator-style spectacle, but because of what the tiger is shown doing. “Some of our national characteristics are strongly associated with the symbol of the tiger,” says Kim. “It’s an animal the Korean people have a lot of national respect for. So I was very persistent and stubborn about it, that’s why [this sequence] was included.”

Nam-Yi engages the Niru in a game of cat and mouse in War of the Arrows

For a moment I observe the standee board to Kim’s left, a stylised publicity shot of the star, Park Hae-il, brandishing a bow and arrow which he aims in our direction. It reminds me of a delicately handled training sequence in which the self-taught Nam-Yi walks beyond the long-range target at which his sister had earlier been aiming to reveal, directly concealed behind it, the target at which he has actually been firing, festooned with dozens and dozens of practice arrows. Nam-Yi has quietly perfected the skill of bending arrows through the air around rocks, trees and, but of course, enemies. It is a bone fide crowd-pleaser, tricksy, sped-up and fun. “Don’t you think arrows are more interesting than guns and knives?” Kim asks, shortly before wrapping. They can be, I say: in the world of guns at least there is a tangible difference between the strategic sniper fire of a film like Enemy at the Gates (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001, USA/Ger./UK/Ire.) and the power-worshipping, meatheaded spectacle of a Stallone movie. Critics may suggest that War of the Arrows sits somewhere between the two in action terms, straddling the divide, but to its credit the film succeeds in creating a sense of entrapment that forces Nam-Yi to retaliate tactically; and at the height of the hero’s exhilarating revenge attacks on the Niro there’s no denying the thrill of watching a single CG-assisted arrow nailing an assailant cleanly behind his hostage . . . So this idea that Nam-Yi can bend an arrow through the air and take out someone in a single shot, is it possible? “I’m not going to tell you!” he says, and suddenly out comes that proud, freewheeling laugh again. “You will have to try it yourself.”

First place on the Honour Roll: director Kim Han-min. Warm thanks also to a jumble of people in the Korean Cultural Centre and the London Korean Film Festival Centre, including Paul Koren, and for her patience, Elizabeth from Margaret London. For doing her utmost to interpret my questions, big thanks and high praise to An Ji-yoon, resident translator at the LKFF. And thanking also Louise at Showbox for her help. This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

1 November, 2011

Part I

EVENT LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2011 GUIDE/PREVIEW VENUE THE MAY FAIR HOTEL

London Korean Film Festival 2011 guide and preview:
news from Mayfair, first impressions, and a salute to curatorial ambition

A warm September evening at the May Fair hotel. This is, apparently, a good place to stay if you need to know who and what is hip now in the fashion world, but more appropriately for us it is traditionally London W1’s luxury rest stop for overseas filmmakers in festival season. Around one hundred people have assembled for the press launch of the London Korean Film Festival 2011. Director Kim Han-min is in the green room, here to publicise his new film War Of The Arrows (hitherto Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon), which in addition to screening for us tonight is scheduled to open the festival formally in the first week of November; an image of its main protagonist, a sensational archer turned Chosun Dynasty-hero played by Park Hae-il, appears on standee boards everywhere. Our mediator is Sight & Sound magazine’s Roger Clarke and he’ll be chairing the Q&A session later on he says. But we are not quite ready for Arrows, which is our main business of the evening, so before Kim’s introduction and the warm hello which we always give Ambassador Choo Kyu Ho, whose seat in front of me I briefly stole earlier, the lights are dimmed for our first look at the 2011 festival trailer. A sort of cinephiliac montage and distillation of the playbill, it begins modestly then whips into a merry-go-round of arrows, round kicks, charging soldiers and a baton fight between schoolgirls which goes effortlessly awry (the bespectacled perpetrator having a bang-up time thwacking her friend on the head while all around them anti-government demonstrations kick off). On the evidence here, Kang Hyung-chul’s Sunny looks set to steal the show this November.

Han Ji-min as Han Gaek-joo / Lee Ah-yeong in Kim Seok-yoon’s Detective K (2011)

Consistently one of the most hospitable as well as representative showcases for any foreign cinema in the U.K., the L.K.F.F. (now in its sixth year) matches the current might of domestic genre cinema with offbeat projects more commonly associated with the arthouse. Familiarity with the festival isn’t necessary, but regulars will recognise the format: the big-screen opening gala, onstage Q & A session with prominent filmmakers, themed programmes presenting the latest film trends, the director retrospective, animation day, the continuation of the Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, and the obligatorily high-profile closing gala. Such a formula has served the festival well for years, but in light of the ongoing work at the Barbican, traditionally the festival’s quieter docile home, its complexion has changed. In 2010 the festival began mining a new seam in central London, playing to the weird carnival excesses of Leicester Square on opening night, then invoking an older artistic heritage in the switch to the I.C.A. building located on the Mall. In particular the Apollo on Lower Regent Street — Piccadilly’s luxury digital cinema which uses new 4K CineAlta projection systems — galvanised the director’s retrospective and focused a multicoloured laserbeam on the whole show . . . And as many of us will this year be redirected into Haymarket for a round of new films, Korean cinema will once again be in the spotlight where I feel it belongs: far from the perimeter, digging the sounds and nightlife of a vibrant city. It was a good time to move the L.K.F.F. 2010-1 into the mouth of the West End.

Go Soo-hee, Hong Jin-hee, Yoo Ho-jeong and Lee Yeon-kyeong in Sunny (2011)

Seong Dong-il and Ryoo Seung-beom in Jo Jin-mo’s Suicide Forecast (2011)

Park Hae-il as master archer Nam-Yi in War of the Arrows (2011)

By now you may know that War Of The Arrows (Choijongbyeonggi Hwal, 2011), a proud action film of slick economy from the director of Paradise Murdered (Geukrakdo Salinsageon, 2006) and Handphone (2009), is the second highest grossing domestic film in Korea. In true Hollywood style, this big budget period piece opens the festival with a red-carpet screening and an onstage Q&A with its affable director. Although it’s not directly tied to the separate existence of the two Koreas (its hook is, rather, the second Manchu invasion of Korea in 1636), Kim wants international audiences to keep in mind the tensions between the D.P.R.K. and the South, particularly the strong resilience and spirit of modern South Koreans in the face of increasing militant action from the North. It’s a theme that readies us for one of the most engaging film strands on the bill in some years.

‘North & South,’ the dominant strand of 2011, brings together a selection of interesting cinematic responses to the phenomena of defection and border-crossing. The best of these deal with the harsh difficulties faced by North Korean settlers of cultural integration. In Park Jung-bum’s Journals of Musan (Musan ilgy, 2010) a North Korean settler toils under miserable conditions in a shantytown around Seoul while struggling to remake himself as a deserving citizen-subject. Jeon Kyu-hwan’s Dance Town (Danseu taun, 2010), a tale about a former professional table-tennis player’s successful defection (the third and final instalment in a trilogy based on urban alienation), brings to the fore the concept of gendered modernity and questions the stock representation of North Korean women purely and singularly as victims. In Poongsan (2011), director Juhn Jai-hong relates the current state of the modern nation’s ideological war with the North through the story of a high-priority defector and the Southern trafficker-cum-action hero commissioned to smuggle her out safely. And in Jang Hoon’s civil war film The Front Line (Gojijeon, 2011), which was selected by K.O.F.I.C. this year to be the official Korean entry for the 84th Academy Awards (and I imagine unwisely), the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality are once again overturned as North and South Korean forces fighting mercilessly over the same piece of land begin to lose their personal identities.

This year’s light comedy strand leads with the biggest domestic success of 2011, and possibly the darling of the festival, Sunny (Sseoni, 2011). Directed by Kang Hyung-chul, whose bright family-values comedy Scandal Makers (Gwasokseukaendeul, 2008) was a major crowd-pleaser two years ago, the film delves into the lives of seven middle-aged women who all attended the same girls high school in the eighties and there formed a gang nicknamed “Sunny.” The bonhomie is enhanced by Kim Sok-yun’s Detective K: Secret of Virtuous Widow (Joseon myungtamjung: Gakshituku ggotui biil, 2010), a daffy adventure romp and whodunit fusing Joseon dynasty conspiracy with rattle-brained slapstick; and there is dark comedy in Jo Jin-mo’s Suicide Forecast (Soosanghan Gogaekdeul, 2011), the picaresque tale of an insurance consultant who sells life policies to suicidal clients in the hope of finally nailing Employee of the Month.

Choi Min-sik as Kang Tae-shik and Ryoo Seung-beom as Yu Sang-hwan in Ryoo Seung-wan’s boxing drama Crying Fist (2004)

Ryoo Seung-wan — the first of two festival attendees returning to film after unexpected sabbaticals — is the subject of this year’s extended retrospective. The director of contemporary crime-action films, one boxing drama and a few unfortunate commercial misfires, Ryoo was obliged to make some interesting though stark choices following the poor revenues from the theatrical run of Dachimawa Lee (Aginiyeo Jioghaeng Geubhaengyeolchareul Tara, 2008). Frank in interview, as well as being refreshingly thoughtful about funding obstacles, the business and South Korea’s identity, Ryoo should lend an engaging personal touch to the retrospective as it’s confirmed he’ll be in attendance (like Jang Jin in 2010) for many of his film screenings. Our starting point appears to be No Blood No Tears (Pido Nunmuldo Eobshi, 2002), the first of Ryoo’s films to be backed by a studio though not the first in the director’s filmography. It’s about violence, opportunism and degradation in modern Korea: two downwardly mobile girls (a former safecracker-now-taxi-driver and an aspiring singer) steal a bag of money in a calculated move to escape their abusive relationships and dreary lives. Ryoo followed Arahan (Arahan jangpung daejakjeon, 2004), a mad melding of the superhero and martial arts genres, and Hey, Man! (2005), his second digital omnibus contribution, with Crying Fist (Joo-meok-ee oon-da, 2004). A less excitable film than its predecessors, Crying Fist unites Ryoo’s brother and long-time collaborator Seung-bum with fanboy favourite Choi Min-sik as two ruined men on a mission to become amateur boxing champions (with Choi fighting to win back his Rookie of the Year title after a fifteen year absence from the sport). The film was based on the true stories of Japanese businessman Hareruya Akira (see “Week in the Life: Hi, I’m Akira and I’ll be your human punchbag today,” The Independent, 1999) and “Korea’s Tyson” Seo-chol. Continuing the organised crime theme, Ryoo’s spin-kicking martial arts film The City Of Violence (Jjakpae, 2006) follows a detective and a reformed gangster (former high school buddies both, with Ryoo taking the role of the latter) from yo-yoing street fight to the guarded compound of their latest enemy, where the boys take on an entire fortressful of uniformed baddies and in the process hack the restaurant to sawdust. In 2008, Ryoo stepped away from his milieu of cops, felons and martial arts masters to reimagine his spy pastiche, Dachimawa Lee, originally conceived as a 35-minute omnibus short film and released digitally in 2000 (it was downloaded 1.5 million times). Drawing on the iconography of domestic 1970s spy films and Manchurian “Westerns” as well as Stateside TV like the Mission Impossible series, Lee (2008) is a bonkers retro parody about a legendary agent and his luckless helper-damsels fighting Japanese imperialists to retrieve a stolen Golden Buddha statuette.

Director Ryoo Seung-wan as Seok-hwan in his The City of Violence (2006)

Kong Hyo-jin as Keum Yeon-ja in Dachimawa Lee (2008)

Ryoo’s newest film, The Unjust (Budanggeorae, 2010), completes the retrospective. A twisting, looping puzzler which plays to Korean cynicism as well as paranoia about institutional corruption, The Unjust follows cutthroat policemen, businessmen and public prosecutors who plot against each other conspiratorially for personal gain then fight it out until the messy end.

Without question the most eagerly anticipated overseas visitor at the festival is self-taught filmmaker Kim Ki-duk. A filmmaker of great cultural and political significance today, Kim has overcome commercial changes in his home market by moving increasingly towards totally independent production. His new micro-budget film Arirang (2011), which closes the festival on the 17th November, is a beguiling self-portrait in which the possibly unfathomable director interacts with his more determinate self, Kim-as-private-personality if you can believe. Paying homage along the way to the international festivals which have given Kim so much vital critical acclaim, it uses the filmmaker’s wounded ego as well as personal memories — specifically of an oft-cited on-set accident which almost claimed the life of an actress working on Dream (Bi Mong, 2008) — as the springboard to track a somewhat fantasmatic recovery from what may or may not have been a nervous breakdown. There is no question, Kim Ki-duk’s presence at the festival is big news. And it’s precisely this quality of access to the most engaging filmmakers operating in Korea today that makes the still relatively youthful London Korean Film Festival a welcome and memorable cinematic showcase.

23 September, 2011

This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.