With just a few days left in the year, it’s time to look back over what has been a landmark decade for Korean cinema. Though some yearn for the halcyon years of the early 2000s, when the industry was coming into its own and taking bold risks on the innovative new ranks of talent that were coming up in droves, there’s no denying the position that the industry now holds as a global heavyweight.
Though the decade began at a time when the industry was in a slump it didn’t take long to recover and retool itself as a sleek purveyor of polished commercial fare and increasingly audacious blockbusters. Starting in 2011, local films reclaimed a major share of the annual box office as the industry grew larger than it ever had before as it entered the era of 200 million yearly admissions.
That said, while the commercial side of the business as only gotten bigger, the 2010s have also been a remarkable time for independent Korean cinema. With cheaper access to equipment and with many would-be filmmakers shunning the blockbuster-driven commercial sector, indie film production exploded and each year has yielded dozens of quality arthouse films, many of them traveling far and wide on the festival circuit.
The decade has also been marked by unparalleled global recognition for Korean films, with several works scoring massive box office returns in foreign territories and the two biggest prizes ever won by Korean films, a Golden Lion from the Venice International Film Festival and a Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival.
This week at KoBiz we’re looking at ten landmark Korean works for each year of the past decade. This is neither a best-of list or a most successful countdown, but rather a cherry-picked look at some the highlights of Korean film across the commercial and indie sectors during the industry’s most spectacular decade.
2010 - Poetry