My Korean Cinema Story

By Guest Contributor refresh_daemon, cross-posted from Init_Scenes

Korean cinema changed my life. That’s a pretty bold claim to make, but my encounter with Korean cinema in 1999, during a trip to see my father in Seoul, fused together with my growing interest in film and television studies and drove me into a place of personal and cultural discovery. But before all that, let’s rewind a little.

Immigrants, Identity, and Movies

My parents were Korean immigrants to the United States, so it was a given that I’d be exposed to Korean media growing up, although it was primarily via rented Korean dramas and variety shows from the local Korean video rental store. And in my youngest, most naive years, I ate it all up, like I ate up 3-2-1 Contact and Sesame Street. I loved it all.

“Jealousy”: a popular 1992 Korean drama, although by then I’d “grown out” of Korean culture.

But once I became of school age, as an Asian American youth in a predominantly white city of a predominantly white US state, and in the heavily conformist culture of public school, there were enormous pressures to assimilate. People who were different got picked on or were never completely accepted and I was different enough by the way I looked and who my parents were, so I largely ignored my cultural upbringing in favor of the things I’d have in common with my friends at school.

Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe) of Sixteen Candles was the embodiment of how I feared everyone perceived me.

As it turns out, I fell in with a group of kids who had a fascination for storytelling and the cinematic medium–many of whom, like me, work in the industry today. But back then, my interest was largely relegated towards the mainstream popular movies that my peers were into.

A Trip to Korea

Now, 1999 was not my first trip to Korea, nor was it the first time I’d ever seen a Korean film, as I’d watched copious amounts of Korean television in my youth while spending summers bored in the Korean countryside. I’d largely dismissed Korean film at the time because, in terms of production values, they paled in comparison to their Hollywood counterparts that I had access to at home.

But 1999 was my first time in Korea as an adult and my first time in Korea since my cinematic awakening. During my downtime in that trip, I watched a lot of Korean television, encountering the growing K-pop machine and still cheesy Korean dramas, but I also encountered Korean film. I distinctly remember watching, and dismissing Kim Sangjin‘s Two Cops 3, but I also found myself captivated by a Korean film as well.

It was about a street tough youth who goes to jail for a crime involving his friend, a young girl who he treats as a younger sister. When he gets out, the girl, now a woman, has developed a strong infatuation for him, but he refuses to involve himself in a relationship with her. Instead he finds his capacity as a fighter drawing him into a life of crime and watches as his friend ends up dating and becoming engaged (or married?) to another man, although she seems to still only have eyes for him. Eventually, his life of crime catches up with him, and the woman he loves and there’s some kind of tragic ending.

Sure enough, it wasn’t a remarkable movie, and it’s not a story you haven’t seen in crime films from the West, but there was some underlying emotion to the film that I connected with on a subconscious level that caused the otherwise unspectacular movie to linger in a way that Goodfellas never did. But that alone would not have caught my interest. No, spurred by what I saw on television, I got my father to take me to the movies and we went to see Nowhere to Hide–and that was a cinematic revelation. Flawed as it was, Lee Myungse showed me via that film that Koreans are just as capable of going beyond the ordinary.

I had not seen anything like this before.

Dipping into the Han

Eventually, my interest in cinema became strong enough to make me make career suicide and major in film at college. Separately, my interest in Korean cinema was growing since that summer, and I found an English-speaking community of Korean film fans at Koreanfilm.org and started to have my parents send me Korean films on DVD from Korea.

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