Korea's Big Moment

Korean director Jang Sun Woo has never been one to shy away from sex and violence—or worry about what the censors might think. In Petal, he restaged the 1980 Kwangju massacre, when Korean soldiers killed or wounded thousands of protesters. His 1994 To You From Me shocked audiences with its explicit sexual themes—and the main character's obsession with her own derriere. Last year he had Korea's censors in conniptions with Lies, an S&M whipfest that begins with a kinky sculptor deflowering a schoolgirl. Lies was in-your-face auteur cinema at its rawest—the censors took the scissors to it, the art-house crowd loved it and average moviegoers, well, they stayed away.

Fast-forward to Jang's latest project, Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, a big-budget cyberfantasy that he's shooting in the southeast port city of Pusan. On location there isn't a whip or handheld camera in sight. A sleek stunt team from Hong Kong bustles about, fine-tuning a barroom shoot-out featuring a gunslinging, transgender Chinese starlet. You can afford that with a $5.5 million budget, which makes this Korea's priciest film production of all time. Forget the art-house crowd. This time Jang is worried about pleasing his investors and drumming up big ticket sales at home and overseas (which means no bizarre sex). "We need the money and we could sink without the foreign audience," says Jang, adding with a grin, "I'm shooting for PG-15."

Not so long ago, betting on the success of a South Korean film would have been foolhardy. Only hard-core cinephiles were sitting through the dialogues in Korean, watching actors nobody had heard of. Even Koreans preferred Hollywood fare. But the nation's cinema is rapidly emerging from the obscurity of the art-house circuit. A new crop of hip young directors and producers is turning out legitimate hits, like Shiri, a slick spy-action thriller, Friends, a sentimental buddy flick, and Ginkgo Bed, a funky exploration of relationships and reincarnation. Koreans are watching their own movies in record numbers—Korean films now pull in 40% of ticket sales, up from 25% three years ago. At more than $250 million, the box-office take in 2000 was almost triple the figure a year earlier.

Most remarkably, Korean cinema is starting to generate buzz—and revenue—overseas. Korean films are attracting growing audiences in cinema-savvy Japan and Hong Kong, as well as in smaller niche markets like Vietnam, where Korean stars are so popular they set fashion trends. Actresses like Lee Yeong Ae and Shim Eun Ha are showing up on the covers of magazines such as Japan's popular weekly Aera. Foreign production houses are signing co-financing deals with Korean partners. Overseas sales, while still small, have tripled in the past three years to more than $7 million. Even Hollywood is paying attention: studio execs might still have trouble finding Pusan on a map, but distributors like Miramax call Korea regularly now to find out what's coming down the pipeline. Korea doesn't yet have a John Woo or a Chow Yun-fat who can make the crossover to the Hollywood big leagues, but its industry is getting noticed. "These are very sophisticated filmmakers," says Dede Nickerson, who heads Asian acquisitions and co-productions at Miramax, which recently bought the martial arts fantasy Bi Chun Moo (Sky-Flying Martial Art). "It is a very strong emerging market."

Korean cinema enjoyed a brief golden age in the 1960s, when the industry churned out loads of mostly light fare to entertain a nation struggling to pull itself out of poverty. But strongman Park Chung Hee snuffed it out a decade later with tight censorship and draconian controls on production houses. Films were vapid and forgettable: even mild criticism of the government was verboten. So was anything racy: viewers didn't catch even the silhouette of a breast until 1985. "Everything was forbidden," recalls director Im Kwon Taek, who, with more than 100 movies under his belt, is considered the grand old man of Korean cinema. (His lush reworking of Chunhyang, Korea's most famous love story, recently won rave reviews in the U.S.) "You could only show kissing scenes from behind."

As Korea stumbled toward democracy in the '90s, the lid popped off. Talented young directors, many trained overseas, began making powerful films that often shocked audiences with graphic depictions of sex and violence. Technical quality improved steadily and genres multiplied. Shiri, released in 1999, was the breakthrough. Hollywood-style in its pacing and punch, it probed the still-sensitive issue of relations between the two Koreas through the story of a North Korean assassin who falls in love with a South Korean counterintelligence agent. The film sold 5.8 million tickets, shattering the previous record for a locally made movie of 1 million. Its $11 million box office grabbed the attention of investors, who are clamoring for new projects.

Then came Friends, an even more phenomenal success. Set in Pusan, the film, released in March, tapped a deep vein of nostalgia in South Korea, where a shaky economy and the go-go pace of life in the Internet fast lane have left many pining for simpler times. Koreans now routinely repeat the movie's best lines, using the rough accents of Pusan gangsters. Comic-strip versions circulate on the Internet, and tourists now make pilgrimages to Pusan. The movie has been particularly popular with men in their late 30s and 40s, who went to school when the Prussian-style uniforms worn by the movie's four "friends" were still obligatory. The film has sold more than 8 million tickets, making it Korea's biggest blockbuster ever. The most anticipated new releases are Little Match Girl, which generated interest at Cannes this year although the script wasn't even finished, and Musa (The Warrior), a big-budget epic set in China and featuring mainland actress Zhang Ziyi. (Musa opens in Korea this week.)

Getting the word out overseas is still a challenge. Few moviegoers outside of the country can name a Korean actor or director or, for that matter, a Korean film. Jason Chae is trying to change that. Working as a cinema journalist in the mid-'90s, he was dismayed to find Korean flicks overshadowed by Japanese and Chinese entries at international festivals because nobody was bothering to promote them. Chae, who grew up as a movie nut, set up Mirovision in 1998, the first company to promote and sell Korean movies overseas. "We needed to do something besides just make the films," says Chae. "Nobody was doing international sales and promotion." He got the ball rolling by putting filmmakers in touch with buyers abroad whom he had met as a reporter. In the wake of Shiri and the growing buzz over Korean films at international festivals, distributors around Asia started to answer his calls. These days, the distribution channels are firmly in place, starting with Japan, the industry's biggest market. Tokyo-based distributor Cinequanon paid $1 million for Shiri, the first Korean film to open nationwide in Japan, where it sold 1.2 million tickets and pulled in an impressive $15 million. Now Korean directors hope to continue to cash in on Japan's interest. Friends' heartthrob Jang Dong Gun is filming futuristic spy-action flick 2009 Lost Memories with a Japanese co-star, Toru Nakamura, and three-quarters of the dialogue will be in Japanese. Korean producer Tube Entertainment expects 2009 to earn more in Japan than in Korea.

The potentially giant Chinese market is another target. Shiri's North Korean angle was ideologically sensitive for Chinese tastes, but bootleg copies of the movie circulate widely underground. Korea Pictures, which produced Friends, sold the movie to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And, even before shooting begins, distributors in all three places have purchased the rights to Failan, a Korean-made film starring popular Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung.

The ultimate challenge, however, is America. Friends' producers are negotiating the sale of the movie to the U.S. for coast-to-coast distribution, possibly before the end of the year. Miramax and 20th Century Fox have expressed interest in Little Match Girl and 2009, says Judy Ahn, international sales manager for Tube Entertainment, which is producing both films. Shiri director Kang Je Gyu is setting his sights even higher. There's a hush-hush project in the works, he says, which involves taking his production company to Hollywood to shoot. "We might get a big U.S. star," he says from his trendy office in southern Seoul. "But I can't tell you who." With his studiously casual jeans, spiky tea-colored hair and an e-mail address that starts CEO_Filmdirector@, he is already halfway to Hollywood—attitude-wise. Now he just has to figure out how to light a match under Tinsel Town.