Movie experts yesterday welcomed the Cannes Film Festival runner-up Grand Prize award for Old Boy, saying it underlined growing international recognition of South Korean films.
"The prize underlines the progress South Korean films have made," movie critic Huh Moon-yong said.
Most of the Korean movies that earned international recognition in the past depicted traditional culture and emphasizing specifically Korean themes.
By contrast, the ultra-savage Old Boy, directed by Park Chan-wook, 41, is based on a Japanese comic book character who is held for 15 years in a hotel basement and tortured by unknown
abductors.
The bizarre and violent tale of a man who goes on a revenge spree kept critics in Cannes on the edge of their seats with its twisted narrative and shocking violence.
"The Cannes festival has begun recognizing the unique style of South Korean films," Huh said.
Park's film marked a departure from the Korean films which had previously screened at international festivals, said Lee Geun-pyo, a sales team manager at South Korean film company Showeast.
"This is a great event in our movie industry as Old Boy marked a departure from past Korean movies that have appeared in international festivals," said Lee.
A string of domestic films riding on a wave of box-office success here are stirring international interest.
In February, South Korean director Kim Ki-duk received the best director prize at the Berlin Film Festival with Samaria, a film that deals with the issue of under-age prostitution.
In 2002, Oasis directed by the incumbent culture minister, Lee Chang-dong, received the best director award in the Venice Film Festival.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby