Films & Series

Thrillers, horrors and K-drama: South Korean films and series like Parasite in Squid Game are extremely popular worldwide. What is characteristic of the work of South Korean makers? And what explains the great success of the productions from the Asian country?

Netflix announced last year that it will spend almost twice as much money on ‘K-Content’ as in previous years. The investment of 2.3 million euros meets a global need: more stories from South Korea.

Productions from the Asian country are popular with a wide audience. So is the first season of Squid Game from 2021, with more than 265,000,000 views, the most-watched season of a series on Netflix. And the films are also doing very well: Parasite by director Bong Joon-ho, it was the first non-English-language production to win the coveted Oscar in the best film category in 2020.

“South Korean makers often choose a genre that allows you to go in many directions and they combine that with aspects from their own culture,” Peter Verstraten, film lecturer at Leiden University, told NU.nl. “In a movie like The Handmaiden from 2016 you are constantly misled. Director Park Chan-wook does this perfectly within the so-called mind game genre. The American films Shutter Island in The Sixth Sense fall into the same genre. But The Handmaiden is also an Asian costume drama at the same time.”

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Impressive cinema is not something of recent years

Playing with a genre that is not completely fixed and the connection with South Korean culture is also reflected in the Oscar winner Parasite. The film revolves around a poor family that invades the home of a rich family. “The central theme of class differences does not play equally strongly in every Western country, but we are mainly familiar with it from British cinema. It makes the injustice in the story sufficiently recognizable,” says Verstraten.

The success of productions from South Korean soil is not something of recent years. The Asian country has been producing impressive cinema since the 1990s and its makers are praised for their way of telling stories.

“That has everything to do with the history of the country,” says Shiko Boxman, board member of the Asian film festival CinemAsia. “South Korea was a military dictatorship until the late 1980s. In the 1970s, productions were heavily censored and cinema was only allowed if it made a positive contribution to government policy.”

“It wasn’t until the 1990s, when the country became truly democratic, that creators could express themselves fully and freely creatively. Moreover, cinema became an important export product that helped boost the South Korean economy.”

“Many of today’s South Korean directors, producers and scriptwriters were involved as students in major popular uprisings against the dictatorship in the 1980s. These uprisings were brutally suppressed by the regime, which was also guilty of extrajudicial detention, rape and even murder “, says Boxman. “The makers themselves have experienced the oppression and injustice that you often see in South Korean films and series.”

American remakes cannot count on the same success

The fact that you cannot reproduce the emotions of South Korean makers is evident from the remake of Oldboy (2003), a film about a man who is locked up for fifteen years for no reason and who goes in search of his captor after his release. The critically acclaimed original received the coveted Grand Prix from the jury at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

American director Spike Lee filmed the story of South Korean Park Chan-wook in 2013, but his version of Oldboy became a flop. Other South Korean films that received better reviews than their American interpretations are A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) by Kim Jee-woon and My Sassy Girl (2001) van Kwak Jae-young.

Verstraten understands that. “We also like it when a film doesn’t come from Hollywood for once.” Boxman also notices this at the CinemAsia Film Festival, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. “The range of Asian productions is still very small in Dutch cinemas,” Boxman concludes. That is why 56 (short) films by makers from Asia and the rest of the world will be shown at the film festival.

According to Boxman, many good films and series are also made in countries such as Taiwan, the Philippines, Mongolia and India. “People often associate India with the well-known Bollywood films, but India also makes strong arthouse films. And especially keep an eye on Indonesia. That country is making great strides in the field of films and series.”

CinemAsia Film Festival takes place from March 5 to 10 in the Amsterdam cinemas Studio/K and Rialto.

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2024-03-03 05:05:00


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