Korean Film Festival DC 2008 | Love is a Crazy Thing

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that South Korea is in the process of conquering the world with its movies, starting with Hollywood. In 2007 both the Korean Film Council, a government-supported organization devoted to the growth and development of Korean cinema, and CJ Entertainment, one of Korea’s biggest movie studios, opened offices in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Shim Hyung-rae’s D-War, an English-language special effects fiesta, opened on more than two thousand American movie screens (an unprecedented feat for a Korean film), and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, the most subversive monster movie ever made and the highest-grossing film in Korean box office history, finally made its stateside debut in theaters and on DVD.

Of course, the news was not all good for Korean cinema last year. After years of record-breaking success, the box office saw a significant downturn. It was brought on in part by the strong-arm tactics used by the United States government in 2006 trade talks that forced South Korea to allow more American movies to reach its screens—and in part by a blockbuster mentality that proved unsustainable.

The Korean movie business may be down for now, but the wealth of talent and creativity that fueled its cinema’s rise to international prominence over the past decade remains strong, as this year’s festival proves. It not only features high-profile releases, such as Choi Dong-hoon’s Tazza: The High Rollers and acclaimed auteur Park Chan-wook’s I’m a Cyborg, but That’s Okay, but it also includes provocative documentaries and independent films that shed light on Korea’s constantly changing society. It also looks to the past, with two films by the great classic-era director Lee Man-hee, and celebrates the achievements of contemporary master Lee Chang-dong, who appears with three of his films.

The sheer diversity of Korean cinema is one of its unique strengths, as the Korean Film Festival DC 2008 attests. We are grateful to our sponsors, the Korean Film Council and the Korea Foundation, for making this festival possible.

In 2003, South Korean media proclaimed that the Korean divorce rate had reached almost 50 percent, the third highest in the world. Although it does not mean that every other marriage ends in divorce, the news surprised many people. Only a decade ago the Korean divorce rate was one of the lowest among developing countries.

For Korean cinema, however, this announcement was hardly headline news. Since the mid-1990s, the crisis of marriage and family has been evident in Korean films, whether it is a comedy, drama, horror, or gangster film. This year’s festival section Love is a Crazy Thing: Love, Sex, and Marriage in Recent Korean Cinema proves that.

Although Green Fish (1997), one of the films in the Lee Chang-dong retrospective, might belong to the gangster genre, the disintegration of a traditional family due to rapid modernization is a major theme of the story. Both Happy End (1999) and Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) touch on the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (the so-called IMF crisis), which accelerated the collapse of the family system. While these works endeavor to restore traditional family values and maintain the institution of marriage, characters in recent films seem to have neither any delusions about marriage nor the will to sustain it.

In Love is a Crazy Thing (2005), marriage vows are broken but no one feels sorry about it. Even “love” itself is suspicious. Driving with My Wife’s Lover (2006) implies that an extramarital affair might not be a make-or-break issue for sustaining marriage. In Before the Summer Passes Away (2006), a recent divorce renders one character incapable of making a commitment to the woman he evidently loves. Ad Lib Night (2006) explores the fragility of family connections when they are no longer held together by notions of familial duty imposed by tradition. The post-family ideology of these films boldly declares that love, sex, marriage, and family are not necessarily connected in modern Korea.

If the high divorce rate in Korea still shocks you, these films will help you cope with the trauma.