"880,000 Won Generation" Cinema: the industry is having a bad hangover

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Category: Diary

[Credit where credit is due: please find the French source there (if you can read French, that is), which I shamelessly pillaged from Le Zèbre (who was not nonetheless mercyful enough to forgive me). July 9]

 

Earlier this year, the Sisa Journal, a major weekly news magazine in Korea, published an article entitled “Cinema has a hangover”. Here are a few comments about this article and its author, U Sok-hun (우석훈), an economist who wrote the bestseller 880,000 Won Generation.

The “880,000 Won Generation” is a popular coinage that refers to low-paid non-regular workers who earn about $650 (net pay) a month, a new lost generation in South Korea as it were. What it means for a lot of young people is the complete failure of an educational system in which graduating from a good university was as good as getting a blank check for a well-paid career in one of the big local corporations.

For U Sok-sun, it is clear that this general job insecurity is also affecting the film industry:  South Korean movies saw their worst sales figures in eight years in 2008, which fell by more than 20 percent from the previous year. Only eight films topped the 2 million mark in ticket sales last year compared to 16 in 2006 and 10 in 2007.

His article is quite the buckshot attack against the Korean financiers and filmmakers who he pretty much accuses of incompetence: according to him, they were unable to endow the industry with adequate structures, conducive to the formation of new talents and funding of new productions. Instead, the professionals of Korean cinema have maintained the “mirage” of the so-called Korean Wave, and have been demanding more and more flexibility, or indulgence, from their collaborators and business partners.

Nothing really earth-shattering there, but the debate took a new dimension in March with the unexpected success of an ultra low-budget indie film, Daytime Drinking, which costs the trifling sum of 10 million wons ($8,000) was shot in 13 days but raked in about 170 millions wons ($135,000 ). This shows that it is actually possible to make quality films without inordinate (Hollywood-style) amounts of money at hand (which Chungmuro doesn’t have anyway) and still draw a large audience.

In the light of the recent commercial performances of the documentary Old Partner and Daytime Drinking, one is tempted to think that South Korean audiences have changed and are ready for something else (better). An artistically ambitious cinema with more modest financial means, perhaps that is the future of Korean cinema?