Films & Schedules - SOUTH KOREA

Set in the 1930s Manchurian desert, three Korean men—a bounty hunter, a gang leader, and a train robber—meet aboard a train and engage in a chase across Manchuria to take possession of a mysterious map.

“One might call director Kim Ji-woon’s stunning homage to Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone a kimchi Western. The film boasts masterful high-speed action like you’ve never seen before: think Stagecoach meets high-wire Jackie Chan meets The Road Warrior. Tongue firmly in cheek, this action-comedy is set on the Japanese-occupied Manchurian steppe in the 1930s as a bizarre trio of Korean exiles—The Good (a sharp-shooting bounty hunter in a duster), The Bad (a wickedly handsome knife-throwing gang leader) and The Weird (a two-fisted gun-slinging thief)—get their hands on a treasure map and then set off in hot pursuit of buried Qing dynasty loot. Kim’s exhilarating, escalating mayhem pits our three antiheroes against fast-moving trains, horses, trucks, motorcycles, Jeeps, explosions, Japanese and Chinese soldiers, and Russian bandits. And, after all that, their final, existential showdown does not disappoint.”—AFI Fest.

Selected Filmography: A Tale of Two Sisters (03), Bittersweet Life (05).

130 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Asian.

Hong Sang-soo's latest wry, comic bulletin from the sex-war centers on a middle-aged man who encounters two married women—and has two very different experiences.

Celebrated art film director Ku Kyung-Nam, invited to a small Korean film festival, runs into old colleague Bu. Invited to dinner, Ku gets drunk, carries on with Bu’s wife, and enrages his friend. A couple of weeks later, Ku meets one of his ex-students, now a famous artist who is surprisingly married to a woman Ku once dated and rejected—a small fact unrevealed to his former student. Ku’s two very different encounters with two very different married women provide a wry, wincing examination of sexual confusion as the oblivious Ku propels himself from one embarrassing situation to another. In true Woody Allen fashion, Sang-soo’s alter-ego offers a comedic take on the pretensions of the world of indy film and filmmakers while deconstructing the paradoxes, ironies, and existential angst of male vanity and insecurity.

Selected Filmography: The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (96), Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (00), Woman Is the Future of Man (04), Woman on the Beach (06).

Sponsored by Oregon Korea Foundation.

126 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Asian, Comedy.

Mother is the story of an over protective mothers’ undying love and devotion for her mentally handicapped son.

“Convinced that her son has been wrongly accused of murder, a widow throws herself body and soul into proving his innocence. After his madcap allegorical monster movie The Host, Bong Joon-ho returns with an even more startling genre film. Mother begins as a cartoonish, almost slapstick comedy about a village idiot and his insanely doting, long-widowed parent. Midway through, the movie takes a serious turn as the 27-year-old child is railroaded into prison for the murder of a local school girl; then, in its last third, Mother unexpectedly spirals into a chilling psychological drama, as its unstoppable, devoted maternal protector appoints herself the case’s chief investigator and mutates into a cosmic force of nature, giving perhaps the performance of the year.”—New York Film Festival.

Filmography: Barking Dogs Never Bite (01), Memories of Murder (03), The Host (06).

This year’s South Korean submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Sponsored by Oregon Korea Foundation.

129 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Asian.