Indie Films Drive Local Market as Studios Avoid Covid Market

Pandemic Levels the Playing Field for Low-Budget FilmsThe pandemic hasn’t been kind to Korea’s film industry as theater operators have been forced to tighten their belts and distributors have found themselves confronted with an uncertain marketplace. Following...

Korean Films Impress Critics and Woo Buyers at Berlin, EFM

Earlier this month, the Berlin International Film Festival staged its 71st edition online. Though forced to make do with a virtual format, the festival has managed to adapt to the changing times as so many other events have been forced to do during these diffi...

The World of Korean Low-Budget Genre Film

Korea’s genre film output has steadily built up a global fanbase over the years but outside of the commercial realm of film and TV, with their big budgets and stars, a growing range of genre offerings have also begun to creep into Korea’s low-budget film realm...

Korean Streaming Market Heats Up

The millions of Netflix subscribers around the world who logged into their accounts over the past few days were likely tempted by scintillating images of an imagined future and dazzling displays of intergalactic travel. However, they didn’t belong to the lates...

Job Title in Need of an Update as Filmmakers Head to the Small Screen

If someone has a title like ‘film director’ it seems reasonable to expect that their job would be to direct films, but things are no longer so cut and dry. These days, when a film director is revealed to be working on a new project, there’s a good chance it’ll...

How Did Science Fiction Become the New Big Thing in Korean Cinema?

Better computer graphics and material exhaustion lead to the dawn of a new genre in the industry Had it not been for the pandemic, “science fiction” might have been the word that best defined last year’s Korean film. SF8, which is dubbed as a “Korean-style Or...

Korean Films to Watch Out for in 2021

Following its most difficult year, the Korean film industry is looking to stage a comeback later in 2021. The global COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the film industry, emptying out theaters, delaying releases and even shutting down some productions, but...

Rising Stars to Look Out for in 2021

2020 was an unusually challenging year for film (and practically every other industry) but partly owing to the fact that so little came out over the past 10 months, we have quite a lot to look forward to in 2021. Provided some improvement in the pandemic mater...

2020 - The Year that Was in Korean Film

Over the past 20 years, few 12-month cycles have been quiet for Korean cinema, an industry that has evolved rapidly during that time, yet none could have imagined the highs and lows it would experience as we woke up to 2020, all the way back on January 1st. Th...

We’re looking at five of Korea’s most celebrated editors

Actors are the people we most often associate with the films we watch, while we’ll often give credit to the directors and screenwriters for the stories we’ve enjoyed and the way they were told. Yet, of course, it takes an army of talented professionals to moun...