Debut
The first South Korean filmmaker to be heard of in the West was Kim Ki-Duk, whose films began to triumph first at festivals and then in theaters in Europe and America.
The first South Korean filmmaker to be heard of in the West was Kim Ki-Duk, whose films began to triumph first at festivals and then in theaters in Europe and America. And Kim Ki-Duk’s first film was ‘Crocodile’, a film with a strong autobiographical component.
Kim Ki-Duk (February 5, 1961 – December 11, 2020) was born in a small mountain town in the north of the country where cinema had never arrived. When he was 9 years old he moved to Seoul with his parents and soon after he enrolled in an agricultural school. At the age of 17 he worked in factories and at 20 in the navy where he did his military service for five years. In 1990 he moved to Paris where he discovered the cinema by watching the first films of his life, including ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, by Jonathan Demme, and ‘The Lovers of the Pont Neuf’, by Léos Carax. He sold the paintings he painted in cafes and spent his nights in the movies. There was born a completely self-taught knowledge of cinema. Back in his country, he began to write scripts for film projects for which he was awarded and shortly after he launched to direct one of them, ‘Crocodile’, his debut feature.
From a script of his own, the film follows a man nicknamed Crocodile (Crocodile), a grumpy outcast who survives under a bridge with a boy and his grandfather. Each of them obtains money and food using his own methods: Crocodile is a great diver, so he collects the wallets of the suicides who throw themselves into the river from the bridge; the boy sells gum and the grandfather has a natural talent for mechanics. Their lives will begin to change the day Crocodile saves the life of a young woman who is attempting suicide, whom he rapes shortly after.
It was a drama about poverty, for which Kim carefully chose a cast of Korean actors, convinced that the actors (in this case Jo Jae-Hyeon, Woo Yun-Kyeong and Cho Jae-hyun, who will become his fetish actor) lay all the weight and strength of the success of a film, in which he introduced a brutal story of a group of homeless people living under a bridge surviving by force of cunning and violence with a story of love and dependency . The film anticipated the combination of delicate photography and the very violent plot that would characterize the director’s work, mixing genres and denouncing the poverty of the society in which he lived. It had little success, but was selected for the Bhutan Festival from where it jumped to other European festivals, now being critically acclaimed. And the film is released in Europe where there is already talk of a new cinematography, that of South Korea.
Kim Ki Duk’s career seems launched but it won’t be until four films later, with ‘The Island’, when he shocks the Venice Film Festival with this mix of lyricism and extreme violence, with a scene that anyone who has seen it will never remember: a fisherman who swallows some hooks.
Later, more successes would come, ‘Spring, summer, autumn, winter… and spring’, ‘Samaritan Girl’, ‘Iron 3’… all films that worked very well and that placed South Korea among the most interesting countries cinematically speaking .
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