Ki-duk Kim

Consumed by jealousy, a woman takes an extreme step and undergoes surgery for a new face. Although her lover of 2 years misses her, he falls in love with the new face, not knowing it’s the same woman.Read More »

Synopsis:
People from all sorts of backgrounds set sail on a warship. They get drunk on alcohol, drugs and sex. Later, everyone grows tired and falls asleep, then the ship enters an unknown space enveloped in fog. In the morning, the people wake up to find the ship floating in the air.Read More »

Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk bares his tortured, inebriated soul in “Arirang,” and it’s not a pretty sight. An experience that can be likened only to being stuck next to a drunk in a bar who keeps reminding you he used to be famous, all his friends are bastards and he now understands the meaning of life, pic might have proved therapeutic to make, but it’s a grind to watch, even for fans of the maverick writer-director’s work. Kim’s rep will inevitably ensure further fest bookings for what is essentially one long whine, but theatrical distribution anywhere looks highly unlikely.Read More »

Quote:
An artistic, shocking love story that disturbed audiences and confused almost all critics that couldn’t see beyond the disturbing images. A mute girl maintains a fishing resort where people stay in floating mini-houses while fishing, resting and using prostitutes. She services them in any way she can in order to make ends meet but the crude clientele annoy her often, forcing her at times to take revenge. Along comes a brooding, suicidal client with a dark past. Will they connect through their pain or treat each other like animals? Full of beautiful scenery, poetically breathtaking symbolism, animalistic sex and behaviour, and notorious for its faint-inducing scenes involving fish-hooks.Read More »

Synopsis
A transient young man breaks into empty homes to partake of the vacationing residents’ lives for a few days.Read More »

Quote:
Dream (or Bi-mong, as is the Korean title) is already Ki-duk’s 15th film. It’s also the 15th Ki-duk film I watched so obviously you can consider me a fan. Ki-duk is a director who’s known to stay pretty close to what he does best, so even though the differences between Dream and his earlier films might not seem stellar, they do present a big deviation for Ki-duk standards. Yet in the end, Dream is still 100% Ki-duk and couldn’t have been made by any other.Read More »

Quote:

I often quote Kim Ki-Duk as my favourite director of all time, partly because of his prolific output (I’m glad he numbers his films, I was losing count!) and his consistently emotional style. While I absolutely adore the “new-wave” Kim Ki-Duk (3-Iron, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…And Spring, The Bow), I also thoroughly enjoy his earlier, grittier films (The Isle, Address Unknown). This film, his debut, is possibly the best and grittiest of the early films. In a setting that stands somewhere between urban and rural, and filled with Kim Ki-Duk’s beloved water motif, we see three misfits (a boy, the title character Crocodile and an elderly man) inexplicably living together on a platform under a bridge.Read More »

Quote:
Perhaps the reason why this movie is getting such a bad rap is mainly a fault of its well-meaning, but still incoherent style and narrative structure. I have not read any articles on this movie or interviews with the director to know what his overt intention was, but in the end I think the movie falls short of its mark due to Kim’s perennial fixation on obsession, whether it was his intention to delve into this subject matter or not. On most levels, obsession is a largely private affair, and any exegesis of obsession enmeshed within the loaded geopolitical situation that is now Korea would require a broader vision and canvas matched with a technical command of story telling than any that Kim has been able to provide here or elsewhere.Read More »

Romances end in blood and the frail hopes of individuals are torn apart in a vile karmic continuity of colonialism…
Address Unknown (2001) is Kim Ki-Duk’s most political film so far which traces the scars left by the Korean war of the 1950s and its contemporary reverberations on a US Army base.Read More »