Those nice people at the Korean Film Archive have given us a new year gift, in the form of twenty-one English subtitled classic movies newly uploaded to their YouTube channel. At least two of these have been available on subtitled DVD before (Come, Come, Come Upward and Gingko Bed) but I’m assuming these are new, […]
Directors: Kang Je-gyu
Saharial at the Terracotta Festival: My Way
My Way, directed by Kang Je-gyu (Taegukgi) and with a pan Asian cast was the selected opening night film for the Terracotta Asian Film Festival. And whilst the top class cast of Jang Dong-gun (Taegukgi, Friend), Joe Odagiri (Azumi, Shinobi) and Fan Bingbing (Shaolin, Flashpoint) sounded very promising, I had heard from some of my […]
War Stories: Taegukgi and Welcome to Dongmakgol screen at the KCC
The Korean War started in June 1950, and the Korean Cultural Centre has selected the War as the theme for the two films to be screened there this month. The first, on 12 June, is Taegukgi (태극기 휘날리며, also known as Brotherhood, or even Brotherhood of War), by Kang Je gyu (2004), while later in […]
How like “Swiri” is “The Way Home”?
That’s the intriguing question posed by Andrew Jackson’s talk at the Sheffield BAKS conference last week. It was a question prompted by a statement by Ahn Sang-gun, a senior figure in KOTRA, the Korean Trade Investment Promotion Agency, and reported in the Donga Ilbo on 5 April 2003: that The Way Home and Swiri are […]