The fifth edition of the Week of Korean Film is marked by recent films produced by the established production house CJ Entertainment. The title alone hints the treatment of film as entertainment



However, we are talking about intelligent and first-class fun and everything but an instant hit made according to Hollywood parameters, even though the focus still remains on the genre. Thus, this program is designed to embrace the already renowned authors of blockbusters such as YK Youn, whose film of catastrophe Haeundae became a huge Korean box office hit in 2006, as well as to support filmmakers of the younger generation such as Seok-jae Hong (Socialphobia) and Sung-moo Kim (The Night of the Prophet), who had recently graduated from the prestigious Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA), d whose debut films greatly surpass classical concepts of student production.

In The Night of the Prophet, Kim follows a “religious” trajectory previously drawn by the established authors such as Kim Ki-duk (Pieta, Amen), Park Chan-wook (character of the priest in Thirst), master of animation Yeon Sang-ho (character of the manipulative fake religious guru in the excellent The Fake aka Saibi) and Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine) who obsessively deals with topics of religion, religious sects and their fanatics. In one of the two stories set at different times, the one that follows 85 hours in the life of a call center worker before her abduction, we see her in an isolated cottage with photographs and drawings that announce the end of the world. However, in a series of flashbacks we return to her early childhood that she spent among the members of a religious cult who signed an apocalyptic pact on a mountain near Jeonju.

In Socialphobia, Hong deals with somewhat different “cults”; this time they are connected to the nervous communication in the digital era, dark side of social media and fake user names, all wrapped up in an utterly icy cyber-thriller cellophane. It is a film with the message that sooner or later the Internet is going to be the end of us. Whether it is the Like button on Facebook or an indiscreet picture on Instagram. Moreover, the author uses non-professional actors who are children and at the same time misogynist warriors whose main weapon is the keyboard and who are getting high on these media every day.

Their antipode is YK Youn’s most recent ambitious blockbuster of epic proportions Ode to My Father, which earned 8,2 mil dollars just in the opening weekend in Korean cinemas. It is a spectacular chronicle about a family of North Korean immigrants, their farewells, reunions, discrimination, escapes, responsibilities, guilt, first love and passion, from the Korean War, across German mines and horrors of the Vietnam War to the present days. In this epic melodrama, YK Youn touches upon an unknown episode from Korean history when in 1960’s miners and nurses went to West Germany to work as guest workers. It was a program financed by the Korean government and the reasons for joining this program were not merely economic but also ideological.

One of the best recent successes of the CG Entertainment production house is the likeable family comedy Miss Granny, which was soon after its release remade in Taiwanese production into an equally well done comedy by the director Leste Chen 20, Once Again!. In the original version, directed by the experienced Hwang Dong-hyuk, a 74-year-old granny goes to a photo studio to take a funeral photo. However, she exits the studio as a twenty-something-year-old woman with a hairstyle like her teen idol Audrey Hepburn from Roman Holiday, and changes her name to Oh Doo-ri. Nevertheless, her “holiday” in Seoul turns into an explosion of K-pop culture, her squandered chances and triviality.

Kang Je-ky found himself on a similar geriatric terrain with his story of a romance between a man and a women in their late age that shows how it is never too late for true love. However, Park Jin-pyo handled a similar topic in a much more radical way in his debut film Too Young to Die. On the other hand, Kango’s Salut d'Amour and Haneke’s Amour, even though they share the motif of growing old, are two complete antipodes. (Dragan Rubeša)