In preparation for our weekend course on Korean cinema this weekend with Brian Yecies I’ve been watching some of the Korean films that AFTRS library has recently purchased.
My first stop was Welcome to Dongmakgol (Park Kwang-hyun, 2005), which is set in 1950 at the start of the Korean War. Several soldiers from each side find their way to a remote mountain village where an American airman is recuperating after his plane crashes in mysterious circumstances. The film is a military-reunification action drama, with the village a metonymy for the whole of Korea and ultimately the site for reconciliation between the two warring sides as the soldiers adapt (or regress) to a simpler, more traditional way of life. It is notable that the soldiers unite to fight the American-led force sent to rescue the airman, which may be a metaphor for Korean cinema’s battle with American media and trade interests which led recently to the reduction in the screen quota which requires cinemas to screen Korean films for a certain number of days per year. (Grady Hendrix also wrote about this on his Asian film blog for Variety, Kaiju Shakedown.)
The movie is hugely enjoyable, even for an audience unfamiliar with the intricacies of North-South relations in Korea. And the film will bring additional pleasure of recognition to anyone who has seen the AFTRS Oscar-nominated short Birthday Boy as there are many shots in Welcome to Dongmakgol which are exact replicas of shots in Birthday Boy and others which are highly evocative of that film – or perhaps it’s vice-versa. I haven’t yet worked out which came first, but there are clear resonances here.
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