Category: Media & Performing Arts

Image credit: Lotte Entertainment | 

The story begins in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic disaster. What if our apartment complex is the only building left standing after a devastating earthquake? Produced by Climax Studio, the production house known for their creative storytelling and exceptional directing in Netflix’s Hellbound and D.P., Concrete Utopia is “a dystopian disaster movie with a difference” that makes you think, “if I were in this movie, what would I do?” – Variety

Concrete Utopia begins as survivors from the hellish outside world converge at Hwang Gung Apartments, the only building left standing in Seoul after a disastrous earthquake. As everything collapses and a brutal cold snap takes hold, desperate survivors seek refuge in Hwang Gung Apartments, posing a threat to the original residents. Starring Korean superstars Lee Byung-hun (Squid Game, Mr. Sunshine), Park Seo-jun (The Marvels, Itaewon Class), and many beloved character actors, the film “[shapes] familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity… [where] human kindness [is] the first casualty of social disorder.” – The New York Times.

Director Um Tae-hwa discusses his award-winning film.

About the Director:

Um Tae-hwa is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. Um made his directorial feature debut with Ingtoogi: The Battle of Internet Trolls (2013) and received the Best New Director Award at the 54th Grand Bell Awards for Vanishing Time: A Boy Who Returned (2016). In 2023 his film Concrete Utopia was selected as South Korean entry in the Best International Feature Film category for the 96th Academy Awards after winning numerous accolades, including the Best Picture Award at the 59th Grand Bell Awards and the Best Director award at the 44th Blue Dragon Award.

World-renowned South Korean directors, including Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, cite Kim Ki-young as being the greatest Korean influence on their work. When Yuh-Jung Youn won the best supporting actress award at the 2021 Oscars, she thanked Kim Ki-young, the “genius” director of the first film she starred in, 1971’s Woman of Fire.

During his thirty year career, Kim Ki-young produced thirty-three films and became revered by critics within the national and international community as one of the few South Korean ‘auteurs’. As the first comprehensive scholarly volume on Kim Ki-young in English, ReFocus: The Films of Kim Ki-young covers his entire career and history of cinematic work, highlighting the thematic and stylistic singularity of Kim’s oeuvre, which was produced relative to the specific historical and cultural conditions of post-war South Korea. It offers an innovative departure point from which to explore South Korean film relative to the wider history of world cinema, in addition to situating Kim’s work within the broader fields of Korean modern history, transnational cinema and cultural studies.

Join us for a conversation about Kim Ki-young’s films and career with the contributors to this volume: Jason Bechervaise, Steve Choe, Chung-kang Kim, and Ariel Schudson.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Jason Bechervaise is an academic and film critic based in Seoul where he has taught Korean Cinema at Korea University and at other universities. His Ph.D thesis, titled Bong Joon-ho and the Korean Film Industry: The National and Transnational Cinema Intersection, was completed at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea (2017). He is the author of several articles including “Parasite Forges New Paradigm on Transnational and National Cinema Intersection”(2020), “Inter-Korean Relations Remain Precarious: The Spy Gone North, Illang: The Wolf Brigade, Swing Kids and Take Point – trends in Korean Cinema in 2018” (2019), in Contemporary Cinema Studies, Contemporary Cinema Research Institute. He is currently featured on KBS World Radio as a film critic, and regularly writes film criticism in The Korea Times and Screen International.

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016), ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2021), and is a co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019).

Chung-kang Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. Her research considers the realms of Korean and East Asian cinema, cultural studies, gender, race, and sexuality studies, and (trans)national visual culture. She is now working on a book manuscript entitled Entertaining the Nation: Politics of Popular Cinema in Trans-War Korea (1937–79). She has contributed to Queer Korea (2020), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (2019), The Holy Nation: Gender and Sexuality in Law and Science (2017), and Orphans, People of No Heritage (2014). Her articles appear in various journals including Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Journal of Korean Studies, The Journal of Literature and Film, and many other Korean journals.

Ariel Schudson is an independent film scholar and moving image archivist. Contributing several articles to the Library of Congress website for their section on the National Film Preservation Board, she was also a regular columnist for several online film and media journals, most notably Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema publication. Her long-running podcast, Archivist’s Alley, is known within the film preservation community for advocating inclusion of archivists from oppressed communities and pushing for greater attention to be paid to LGBTQI+/BIPOC/disabled moving image materials. She began writing about and researching Korean cinema in 2011, moving from Los Angeles to Seoul in 2019. Her research focuses on classic Korean cinema and women’s representation, with a strong emphasis on disability theory, gender performativity, and sexual expression. She recently presented her work on Kim Su-yong, entitled “The Politics of Desire: Kim Su-yong’s Burning Mountain and Women’s Representation” at the Forgotten Popular Culture: Asian Cinema and Film History conference.