The first South Korean filmmaker to be heard of in the West was Kim Ki-Duk, whose films began to win 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 win 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 the age of 20 in the navy, where he completed his military service for five years. In 1990 he moved to Paris, where he discovered cinema by watching the first films of his life, including Jonathan Demme’s ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and Léos Carax’s ‘The Lovers of the Pont Neuf’. He sold the paintings he painted in cafes and spent his nights in movie theaters. A completely self-taught knowledge of cinema was born. Back in his country, he started writing scripts for award-winning film projects and soon after, he directed one of them, ‘Crocodile’, his first film.
From a script of its 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 in his own way: Crocodile is a great diver, so he collects the purses of the suicides that throw themselves from the bridge into the river; the boy sells chewing gum and the grandfather has a natural talent for mechanics. Their lives will change the day Crocodile saves the life of a young woman 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) the power of a film’s success, in which he introduced a brutal story of a group of homeless people living under a bridge who survived through cunning and violence with a tale of love and dependence. The film anticipated the combination of delicate photography and the highly violent plot that would characterize the director’s work, mixing genres and exposing the poverty of the society in which he lived. It had little success, but was selected for the Bhutan Festival from which it jumped to other European festivals, which are now widely acclaimed. And the film will be released in Europe, where there is already talk of a new cinematography, that of South Korea.
Kim Ki Duk’s career seems to have 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 him will never see. . remember: a fisherman swallowing some hooks.
Later on there would be more successes, ‘Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring’, ‘Samaritan Girl’, ‘Iron 3’… all films that worked very well and brought South Korea to the most interesting countries cinematically speaking.
Source: La Verdad
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