The South Korean Film Renaissance
Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs
by Jinhee Choi
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Book Presentation:
How a homegrown cinema took on Hollywood and dazzled Cannes
For the past decade, the Korean film industry has enjoyed a renaissance. With innovative storytelling and visceral effects, Korean films not only have been commercially viable in the domestic and regional markets but also have appealed to cinephiles everywhere on the international festival circuit. This book provides both an industrial and an aesthetic account of how the Korean film industry managed to turn an economic crisis--triggered in part by globalizing processes in the world film industry--into a fiscal and cultural boom. Jinhee Choi examines the ways in which Korean film production companies, backed by affluent corporations and venture capitalists, concocted a variety of winning production trends. Through close analyses of key films, Choi demonstrates how contemporary Korean cinema portrays issues immediate to its own Korean audiences while incorporating the transnational aesthetics of Hollywood and other national cinemas such as Hong Kong and Japan. Appendices include data on box office rankings, numbers of films produced and released, market shares, and film festival showings.
About the Author:
JINHEE CHOI is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Kent in the U.K. She is the coeditor of Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (2005) and Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (2009). She has widely published in such journals as the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Asian Cinema, Post Script, and Jump Cut.
Press Reviews:
“Here is an excellent book to add to the too-short shelf of work on the cinema of South Korea, which of late has produced some excellent films…. Deftly illustrated with frame blowups, and including useful appendixes charting box-office hits, film production overall in South Korea, and award-wining films, Choi’s book provides an energetic, accessible overview of the Korean cinema as a popular art form. An excellent choice as either a course text or a library resource, this book fills a particular niche. Highly recommended (for) all readers.”—W.W. Dixon, Choice
> From the same author:
Cine-Ethics (2016)
Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship
Dir. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey
Subject: Theory
Horror to the Extreme (2009)
Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema
Dir. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
> On a related topic:
Urban Landscapes and National Visions in Post-Millennial South Korean Cinema (2023)
From Seoul to Soul
Vicious Circuits (2019)
Korea's IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century
Tourist Distractions (2016)
Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema
The Late and Post-Dictatorship (2025)
Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea
The South Korean Film Industry (2024)
Dir. Junhyung Cho, Sangjoon Lee and Dal Yong Jin
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