Topic

Korea

A peninsula that turned a century of occupation and war into a cultural export machine.

5: in film
13:00: average
65 min: in total
41: across the network

Korea across the network →

All briefs5

13:00

KPop Demon Hunters

Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang · 2025

KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 Sony Pictures Animation film co-directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans. It follows Huntrix, a K-pop girl group who double as demon hunters rooted in Korean folklore, as they confront the Saja Boys — boy-band idols secretly tied to the jeoseung saja. Animated in a bold 3D style inspired by music videos and Korean drama, with songs and score by Marcelo Zarvos, it blends myth, music, and modernity. Released on Netflix, it won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song at both the Golden Globes and Oscars.

13:00

Sing a Song of Sex

Nagisa Ōshima · 1967

Sing a Song of Sex (1967), directed by Nagisa Ōshima, follows four Tokyo high school seniors over a single day—February 11, 1967—as they drift between exams, fantasies, drinking, and competitive singing. Structured as a musical collage rather than a linear narrative, it centres on the shunka folk song Yosakoi Bushi and explores frustrated male desire, generational disaffection, and the submerged Korean roots of Japanese identity. With improvised performances, overlapping sound design, and deliberate narrative gaps, it treats song as both archive and weapon.

13:00

The Steel Helmet

Samuel Fuller · 1951

Samuel Fuller’s 1951 war film The Steel Helmet is the first American feature about the Korean War, made independently in ten days on a $104,000 budget. It follows a grizzled U.S. sergeant and a ragged patrol taking refuge in a Buddhist temple, confronting racism, command failure and moral compromise under fire. Ernest Miller’s cinematography and Fuller’s lean script prioritise psychological realism over spectacle. Though constrained by its production, the film remains a landmark for its immediacy, thematic rigour and refusal to flatter its subject — or its audience.

13:00

The Face Reader

Han Jae-rim · 2013

Set in 15th-century Joseon, The Face Reader follows Nae-gyeong, a master of gwansang, who uses facial analysis to navigate court intrigue after being drawn from seclusion into royal service. When King Munjong dies, he must choose between loyalty to the late monarch and survival under the usurping Grand Prince Suyang. Anchored by Song Kang-ho’s restrained performance and Han Jae-rim’s deliberate direction, the film treats physiognomy as psychological method rather than mysticism — though its final act falters under the weight of historical inevitability.

13:00

The Wailing

Na Hong-jin · 2016

Na Hong-jin’s 2016 Korean mystery-horror follows a rural policeman investigating inexplicable violence in his village. As explanations multiply — shamanic curse, demonic possession, epidemic, colonial panic — none cohere, and conviction becomes indistinguishable from delusion. With deliberate pacing, restrained performances, and Hong Kyung-pyo’s naturalistic cinematography, the film sustains dread through ambiguity rather than revelation. Its power lies in how thoroughly it models the exhaustion and danger of not knowing — and how easily certainty replaces it.