South Korea

PLOT:
A woman catches her husband cheating and in a fit rage brings a knife into his bedroom, slips under the covers and tries to castrate him. He awakes and thwarts her impetuous plot but still wracked with anger she then visits her teenage son’s room and dismembers him instead.

The above plays out over mere minutes but to say any more about the events that unfold would only dilute its impact. Safe to say, things only get worse and more bizarre as the film’s protagonists are pushed to delirious extremes. It’s not exactly a restaging of the Oedipal Complex (though some of its elements are evident) but it does borrow a lot from Greek tragedy, though it’s a bit more extreme than what you would find in the Classics.
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Synopsis:
Hidden in the bushes along the river bank, a woman’s body is found severed into six parts. Homicide forensics expert KANG is called into investigation, eventually arresting environmentalist fanatic LEE as the main suspect. Meanwhile, KANG heads to the airport to pick up his daughter who hasn’t been back in Korea for 10 years. A stranger, supposedly ordered by LEE, gives KANG an envelope filled with pictures of his petrified daughter held captive. KANG goes to meet LEE believing the river bank murder case is involved with his daughter’s kidnapping. In order to save his daughter, LEE tells KANG to release him within 3 days, pushing KANG into an impossible fork in the road.Read More »

Quote:
Is she tired of life or love? Why else is Haewon falling asleep in a restaurant? Haewon, a student, feels abandoned. Her mother is about to emigrate to Canada and Haewon has decided to end her affair with one of her professors because he is so unsupportive. Not only do Haewon’s fellow students get wind of the affair, but her married paramour refuses to accept that their relationship is over. Confused, Haewon withdraws into her shell. Other men cross her path which eventually leads her to an old fortress in the mountains above Seoul. There she finds not only rice wine and a familiar melody, but also a bold escape route.

In his previous films, Hong Sangsoo explored love’s unfathomable paths and the impossibility of relationships from the point of view of his male heroes. Now he changes perspective. However, the emotional world of his protagonists is no less puzzling and fickle – just like Haewon herself, a young woman who likes to dream. And perhaps this film is simply one of these dreams, from which she will awake to find herself in the strangest of places. For who can say how unreal our waking life is, or how real our dreams?
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Interview follows a film crew while they sort through interviews to make a movie, which may or may not be a documentary, about destined love. In the process, the director within this film, Eun-suk (Lee Jung-jae) seems to be destined to fall in love with one of the interviewees, Young-hee (Shim Eun-ha). We learn through a purposely disjointed narrative that this may not have been when Eun-suk met Young-hee for the first time. Added to this temporal disorientation is further doubt in the events unfolding since Young-hee is as unreliable in her interview as Eun-suk is silent about his past.Read More »

Quote:
This film was originally shot by Father Norbert Weber (1870-1956), head of the Missionary Benedictines, during his second visit to Korea in 1925 on some 15,000 meters of raw film. Fr. Weber was abbot of the archabbey of St. Ottilien in Germany and made the film in order to show the country, its culture, and the order’s activities to people back in Germany. It was first screened there in 1927..Read More »

Synopsis:
Lee Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) is a debt collector. If he shouldn’t get his money he doesn’t refrain from committing any atrocity. Therefore, he has already turned quite a few of his victims into cripples in order to get his hands on the insurance policy, and some of them even took their lives. But Kang-do’s world is completely turned upside down when one day a woman (Jo Min-soo) stands at his doorstep and claims to be his mother who left him alone after giving birth to him. The debt collector turns her away several times, but the woman is stubborn and wants to atone for her sins. Read More »

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In Another Country is an airy comic romance by the Korean director Hong Sangsoo which begins in a hotel in Mohang, a quiet Korean seaside town. A young film student called Wonju (Jung Yumi) idly jots down script ideas in her room. As she writes, we see three, or perhaps four, distinct stories playing out, all made up of common characters and motifs that emerge from Wonju’s scribblings.Read More »

Synopsis:

A young housewife, finds herself having strange dreams that make her disgusted by meat, leading to trouble with her meat-loving husband and attention from her artist brother in law.Read More »

The Isle is a case in point. Based around a primitive fishing community on a lake, it’s beautifully shot though morally bankrupt, far too eager to visually astound one moment then deeply shock the next. It focuses on a pseudo sado-masochistic relationship between a mute woman and a murderous ex-cop and, seemingly, is out to break almost every taboo available. There’s animal cruelty on a grand scale. There’s at least one rape scene, and one scene in which sexual violence towards women is almost justified by the filmmaker. There’s self-mutilation; a myriad of bodily functions; and, perhaps only a hundred lines of dialogue in the entire movie. It’s almost as if Kim is setting himself up to be Korea’s Takashi Miike, only with better cinematography.Read More »