Kim Ki-duk is one of the filmmakers who initially drew me to Korean cinema. The first film of his I saw was The Isle (2000), which was, in a French DVD edition, packaged together with Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (1999). While the films may have been very different they were also a fantastic double bill that complemented each other in many ways. I wasn’t as shocked by the violence as I may have been because I had already seen Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and before dipping into Korean cinema, had more or less exhausted Takashi Miike’s catalogue up until that point (around 2003).
Park’s film, while harrowing, was a pure piece of cinema brimming with adrenaline and the pure pleasure of filmmaking. Lee’s poignant drama was elegant, realistic, literary, and propelled by social issues and recent Korean history. Kim’s effort was slow and laconic, it was violent while at the same time elegiac. The Isle had an artist’s touch and was unlike anything I’d seen before, just as the previous two films were. Indeed I was very lucky to have selected the three Korean films that I did as my introduction to the nation’s cinema, the hooks were in deep from the start.
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