This Is What Korea Needs More Of

As I’ve stated here before my main area of study is Korean film history and culture. I have an entire bookshelf filled to the brim with Korean DVDs and have studied in Korea. Recently however I have been slightly disappointed with the output of the Korean film industry. While there have been some great films, on the whole Korea has fallen into a creative slump producing cookie cutter melodramas, sequels to films that don’t really need sequels, and rather tepid blockbuster films. The other night over drinks with a fellow Korean film scholar/fan we got to discussing the state of the Korean film industry and what we think could help fix it. I stated rather bluntly that what Korea needs more of is independently minded directors who just want to make films. In a sense Korea has become stagnant because it has become complacent in its success (it is only the second country after India to retake the domestic box office from Hollywood) and like Hollywood has become adverse to the experimentation that makes interesting national films.

My argument, perhaps too idealistic and full of youthful zeal but that’s the way I roll, was that young directors in Korea need to band together and just make films instead of sitting around writing scenario after scenario and never getting them picked up by a production company. Korea is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. The internet is easily accessible by most of the country via cell phones, PC rooms, or even on the street at kiosks. Seoul itself is a wireless enabled city and this is a culture that created the netizen. The DVD industry is all but dead in Korea and there is a severe lack of art house cinemas. The multiplexes usually do not pick up smaller independent films or documentaries as they do not preform well going against the latest romantic drama with whatever young actors are trending at the moment, and the Hollywood blockbusters make them too much money.

So what should they do? I’m shocked that more people do not release them online. Here is a country that makes our high speed internet look like dial-up, with a population that is constantly hooked up to the internet and there is nothing like the Netflix rental service or even Hulu. I argued that all it would take would be for one or two things to make it big, or sort of a filmmaking revolution that used social networking and new media distribution techniques to change this. I feel that if young filmmakers gather together and use existing technology such as Vimeo, Youtube, and even the Chinese Youku (as the Korean wave was a smash in China) they could start that same revolution. Think about it a couple years ago webseries and webisode were not in our lexicon. Now they make up a large portion of our viewing. How long has it been since you have watched TV on TV? I use Hulu for most of my shows and Netflix for the rest. Documentary director Kim Dong-won (sort of a personal hero to me) started Purn Productions which is a documentary collective that has produced some of the most interesting documentary work I’ve seen and arguably the modern equivalent of minjung art (which is a whole other article for another time). 

There is light at the end of the tunnel however, The Romantic Movement Seoul is a new project staring Min Hyo-rin and adapted from the first several chapters of Romantic Movement, a novel by popular Swiss writer Alain de Botton. Now this sounds like just another Korean drama, especially with directors such as Kang Chul-woo and Park Hyun-jin at the helm. Each director gets a segment (there will be four in all) and it is shot on location around Seoul with the Canon 5d (a DSLR camera that shoots 1080p HD video). The major difference is that this is being released online. The first episode was released on the 30th and the site has integrated twitter in an interesting way on their fan wall, and if I’m not mistaken uses WordPress as a CMS (much like us). In between each episode there are also several webisodes featuring the series number one fan (a crazy American who is rather entertaining) as well as behind the scenes footage. Min Hyo-rin is not the only rather big star in this either, Yeo Wook-hwan, Defconn (a Korean hip-hop performer), and Mate’s Jung Jun-il will all have roles in the short film. I have watched the first episode and it is decently acted and shot well, although it is very melodramatic and so far doesn’t differentiate itself stylistically from any other k-dramas you might see on television.

I do not think this is a bad thing at all. In fact it was a smart choice on the part of the project leaders as it will allow Korean audiences a familiar transition to a newer format, and appeal to a much wider audience than say a Korean equivalent to The Guild. Choosing the very popular author Alain de Botton was another genius stroke. The broader appeal that this project receives the more likely similar projects will be made. The other thing that I appreciate is the English subtitles embedded in the video. They are appealing to a wide audience, and I am interested in what is coming next and wish them the best of luck. Hopefully it will catch on and people will try to expand stylistically and explore the digital format.

You can follow Romantic Movement on twitter. And here is the Part 1 of the first episode: