Forgot password

 

 2010 was the 60th Anniversary of start of the Korean War, and numerous war films were planned to commemorate the event. However as it is with war films, tremendous funding was needed and only a few were actually materialized into films. Followed by last year’s <71-Into the Fire>, and a small piece <In Love and the War> is already released this year, but the ones that are heating up the scene is blockbuster <The Front Line> and <My Way>. 

 

<The Front Line> is the third movie by JANG Hoon. Starting his career as KIM Ki-duk’s assistant director, he made his first debut in the spotlight with <Rough Cut> (2008), its screenplay was written by KIM Ki-duk. With his next movie <Secret Reunion> (2010), a commercial film completely out of KIM Ki-duk’s circle of influence, JANG succeeded to draw 5.4 million audiences to the theaters, becoming a star director. A film that started from a suggestion made by distributor Showbox, who also distributed <Secret Reunion>, <The Front Line> will be a film testing JANG who successfully entered the world of commercial films, to see whether he can handle this US$10 million blockbuster steadily. If he does pull it off, it is highly likely his name will always come up when discussing Korean commercial films. <The Frontline> was set in 1953, when a ceasefire negotiation was in progress during the Korean War. As the negotiations came to a deadlock, the South and North engaged in a fierce battle to occupy as much land as possible. Aerok Hills, a fictional location from the movie, was one of these places in battle that the South and North fiercely fought on. The South Korean Army and the People’s Army of the North Korea fought with their lives to reclaim this Hill, with the victor changing by the day. 

 

In his previous two works, JANG did an excellent job in depicting friendship and duel between two men. In <Rough Cut> it had been an actor and a thug, while in <Secret Reunion> it had been a National Intelligent Service agent and a spy. This time it’s soldiers of the South and the North. In a bigger picture, confrontation of ‘two men’ has become confrontation of ‘two countries’. SHIN Ha-kyun and KIM Ok-bin from <Thirst>, GOH Soo from <White Night> as well as LEE David whose name is just beginning to be known for his role as the grandson in LEE Chang-dong’s <Poem> are main casts of the film. Screenplay was written by PARK Seong-yeon, who gained fame as the original writer of PARK Chan-wook film <JSA: Joint Security Area> and writer of popular TV drama ‘Seondeok Yeowang’.

 

Coincidentally, in 2010 while <The Front Line> was in the middle of its shooting, actual war clouds covered the Korean Peninsula. A Korean naval ship, the Cheonan sunk after being attacked by North Korea and Yeonpyeongdo, a small island in the western shore was bombed resulting in civilian casualty. Director JANG is hush on the details of <The Front Line>. Nevertheless, he made it clear that “the message the film gives is simple. War should not occur, and it should not be an option.” He also added “I sure did think about whether it was right to make a war movie while a potential war could have started at any time. Yet this movie was the only thing we could do. I decided to do my best in making it.”  

A large portion of <The Front Line> was filmed at Baekam Mountain in Hamyang, Gyeongsangnamdo, a place that became barren after fire burnt down the trees in the spring of 2009. JANG explains there were no such thing as routes for staffs and actors to climb at first but a new path was made after months of shooting the crew walking back and forth. The desolate image of the burnt-down hills gives us some idea of what kind of color <The Front Line> will be. It is one of the film’s goals to show the ‘Korean’ colors of the earth and sky, nothing like the monotones we saw in the film <Saving Private Ryan>.  

 

<The Front Line> is already pre-sold to Germany, UK and Thailand. A film where soldiers of the North and South become entangled, bullets, grenades, bombs and American bomber planes flying overhead, <The Frontline> is to be released in Korea at the end of July or early August, distributed by Showbox.