Here They Come: South Korean Women Film Directors Event

Starting with the phenomenal domestic success of the action thriller Shiri (1999) that provided a blueprint for the South Korean blockbuster, the profile and popularity of New Korean cinema abroad grew.

Park Chan-wook’s 2003 violent thriller Oldboy has arguably put South Korean cinema on the map of world cinema, and its reputation peaked with Parasite (2019)’s historic win at Cannes Film Festival (Palme d’Or) and at the 92nd Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film) in 2020.

South Korean cinema’s international success, however, does not provide a fuller picture. Types of Korean films that have been theatrically distributed and successful in the west often limited to award-winning films by acclaimed male auteurs, which are ‘Funny, political and bone-crunchingly violent’ as a Guardian newspaper article headline sums up. Therefore, not surprisingly, women’s cinema and women filmmakers’ wide-ranging contribution to Korean cinema have been consistently overlooked by film audiences and academics alike.

This talk intends to celebrate Korean women filmmakers, from pioneers to a new generation, and explore diverse ways in which women’s cinema address the issues around gender, equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and the #MeToo Movement within the Korean film industry and wider fields.

Speaker Bio

Chi-Yun Shin is a Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She has co-edited New Korean Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2005), which is one of the first English-language scholarly publications on Korean Cinema. Her interests also expand more widely across Asian Cienma, as is evidenced by works such as the collection East Asian Film Noir (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Chi-Yun has recently turned her attention to the study of South Korean women directors and organized the South Korean Women's Cinema conference in 2021, funded by the Academy of Korean Studies. She is a recipient of fellowships from Korea Foundation as well as from the Academy of Korean Studies