It's Korea in the theatres

South Korean cinema is making waves globally, while Bollywood lags far behind

South Korea is emerging as the pop culture star of the decade: its smartphones are cool, so is Gangnam Style. And now, the world is discovering its cinema. While Indian films still appeal to diaspora audiences worldwide, Korean films have a much broader appeal.

 

Snowpiercer is a sci-fi action thriller-cum-social drama set in a future ice age

Snowpiercer, an English-language film from South Korea, starring Hollywood actors Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton as well as Korean film stars, became a domestic and global hit, having grossed over $80 million since its release in Korea last year and in the United States this summer. Last month, the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the top film festivals in the world, featured cinema from Seoul in its City to City segment, two years after showcasing Mumbai in that slot.

The festival’s artistic director, Cameron Bailey is familiar with both Korean and Indian cinema, being a programmer for both City to City and south Asian films at the festival, and he believes Indian films are underperforming in the Asian market, especially in east Asia. “The big stars in Korea are pan-Asian stars. That’s interesting and something I would love to see happen a little bit more with Indian cinema. Certainly Indian cinema is incredibly popular around the world and especially in west Asia, South Africa, east Africa but it hasn’t always penetrated throughout the rest of Asia as much as I think it should,” Bailey says.

The success of Korean films is not limited to Asia. They have become known around the world for their slick, fast-paced action. Snowpiercer, directed by famous Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, is a sci-fi action thriller that was distributed by the Weinstein Company in the US and drew rave reviews. AO Scott wrote in The New York Times, “Planetary destruction and human extinction happen a half-dozen times every summer. It’s rarely this refreshing, though.”

 

Cold Eyes is a cop thriller featuring high-risk, hi-tech hunt for organised crime leader

Cold Eyes, a crime thriller and one of the top Korean box office hits of 2013, played at Toronto last year; this year’s slate included another box office hit, A Hard Day, offering non-stop action laced with humour. These films, as well as other recent hits, are world-class in terms of their production, scripts, acting and special effects. They could give Hollywood a run for its money if they got wider play, and are galaxies ahead of most commercial films in India today.

Their rise has been fairly swift. Lee Tae Hun, the producer of Snowpiercer and executive producer of Cold Eyes, noted in an interview in Toronto that nobody knew about the Korean film industry before 2000. The older directors mostly made arthouse films for the festival circuit. During 2007-2011, the industry went through a slump in step with the global recession, but bounced back strongly. As film producer and CEO of Finecut, Suh Youngjoo, said during a discussion at the Toronto festival, “The new breed of writer-directors focus on general audience taste, they also think of marketing and current trends, and that’s good for the box office.” Another panelist, Kim Mee-Hyun, director of global marketing at the Korean Film Council, said the shift from censorship to a rating system had contributed greatly to the rapid growth of the film industry in South Korea.

The freedom from censorship might explain the presence of explicit scenes in many Korean movies. The social drama, In Her Place, which played at Toronto this year, has a graphic scene of a doctor slicing open a dying pregnant teenager’s belly to deliver her baby. The neo-noir thriller Confession shows a man being expertly stabbed right through. A Hard Day has plenty of violent action. Bailey says South Korean filmmakers have a daring seen in few other countries. “They’re able to tackle subjects that are very controversial, they’re able to show violence and sex and disturbing scenarios sometimes in a way that’s not possible in other parts of Asia, including in India. That has allowed them to push the limits of storytelling, to push the limits of their audiences,” he says.

 

A Hard Day is a neo-noir thriller about a cop who is blackmailed after trying to cover up a hit-and-run

According to Kim Mee-Hyun, South Korea has the strongest domestic film market after “Hollywood and Bollywood”. Box office receipts in South Korea touched $1.42 billion in 2013, nearly equal to India’s $1.5 billion, but from a population of just about 50 million. According to a report from the Korean Film Council, each South Korean watched an average of 4.25 films last year, the highest in the world.

But they’re not watching Indian films. Kim Seong-hun, the director of A Hard Day, says the only Indian film he has seen is Dancing Muthu, the 1995 Tamil film starring Rajnikanth, which was dubbed in Japanese and became a huge hit in that region. Korean films could find a market in India before Indian films play in Korea.

Lee Tae Hun says one of his hit productions, The Man From Nowhere, a 2010 action thriller, could be remade for the Indian market. “I got some proposals from the Indian production guys and for other films as well. I believe there could be a chance to co-work between India and Korea. But at the moment, it is a very beginning stage and we have to work very hard on that for the future,” Lee says.

Another market where Korean films have made inroads but Indian films have lagged behind is China. The Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots was a huge underground hit in China, where everybody had watched it on the Internet before it was eventually released there two years later. “Everybody criticised the Chinese industry for why we couldn’t make a movie like that,” says director Peter Ho-sun Chan who could never make it past the first 30 minutes of the film but finally watched it after three or four attempts. “I was so taken with the film and I went back and told my team that I want to make a movie, not like that, but I want to make people feel like that after they watch my movie,” he added. The result was American Dreams in China, a comedy-drama about three Chinese entrepreneurs who build a business empire teaching English to students seeking US visas. Chan, one of the most successful directors in China, brought his latest film Dearest to Toronto this year. Chan, who also said The Lunchbox was one of his favourite films, noted there was no follow-up by the Indian film industry to capitalise on the success of 3 Idiots in China.

With strong local markets, well-established film infrastructure and different strengths overseas, the South Korean and Indian film industries could complement each other on the global stage. But that’s not a scenario being scripted in either country at this time.