A Korean Detente

During the height of the Cold War between North and South Korea, South Korean filmmakers risked imprisonment if they dared to cast their Communist neighbors in a sympathetic light. So it’s not surprising that 39-year-old South Korean writer-director Kang Je-Gyu expressed gratitude at having come of age as a filmmaker during a much more tolerant era in his country’s politics.

“There was one South Korean filmmaker who went to jail in the 1960s for positively depicting North Korean people,” Kang recalled through an interpreter last week during a visit to Los Angeles. “But after the Seoul Olympics in 1988, the government became more open to a democratic system and free expression. So I didn’t feel any pressure [to toe a certain political line] when I started making movies [in the 1990s].”

Indeed, Kang’s 1999 film, “Shiri,” which opens in Los Angeles today, is a landmark work because it’s a popular film that actually portrays North Koreans in a humanistic manner. The high-octane action thriller/romantic drama was a blockbuster in its native country and broke the box office record in South Korea previously held by “Titanic.” (It’s a record that has since been surpassed.) About one out of seven South Koreans viewed “Shiri” in 1999. It was even embraced by the South Korean government, which arranged a free screening of the movie for all foreign diplomats stationed in the country.

“This is the first Korean movie to get any significant distribution in the United States,” observes David E. James, who teaches East Asian film at the USC School of Cinema-Television and who recently was host of several festivals of Korean films at USC. “Other films, like Im Kwon Taek’s ‘Chunhyang’ [which briefly screened in the U.S. in 2000-01], have played for a week here and there, but never with any kind of commercial distribution on this scale.” “Shiri,” which has already been released in Europe and Asia, is now playing in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington,D.C.

“Shiri” is about a renegade group of North Korean commandos infiltrating South Korea in order to steal newly developed and highly potent liquid explosives. The aim is to use these bombs to terrorize the South and instigate another war between the two countries. The group’s hope is that an armed conflict will lead to reunification in the divided Korean peninsula. Two crack South Korean counterintelligence agents attempt to hunt down these zealots, who are willing to die for their cause and whose ranks includes an elite assassin who happens to be a beautiful woman.

The North Korean commandos are clearly wearing the black hats in the film. But Kang also sympathetically expresses the desperation and righteousness that drive these militants, whose overarching goal is to ease the suffering and starvation back in their home country. When the film was being conceived, serious food shortages were occurring in North Korea.

“I had a chance to talk to some North Korean students when I was making my first film, [1996’s] ‘The Gingko Bed,’” Kang says. “Most South Korean people don’t have much of a chance to talk to North Koreans. So I had my own prejudices against them as well. But after talking with these students, I realized that even though we are living in two different political systems, we’re the same human beings.”

But politically, North Korea remains a pariah, at least to President Bush, who in recent speeches has referred to that country as part of what he calls “the axis of evil” and a terrorist state.

Meaningful Issues Cloaked in Action-Thriller

These discussions prompted Kang to explore making a movie about the division between the two Koreas and the idea of reunification. But after surveying numerous South Koreans, he realized that there was limited interest in a film with this type of overt political orientation.

Instead of abandoning the project, Kang wrote a script that he thought was commercial as well as socially meaningful. It’s not hard to understand why “Shiri” appealed to so many South Koreans. The film has plenty of galvanic action sequences to satisfy testosterone-laden guys, a number of surprising twists and turns, and a heart-tugging love story to satisfy most romantics.

Kang is also happy that “Shiri” has brought a greater awareness of the humanity and plight of North Koreans to his fellow countrymen.

The popularity of Kang’s fantasy-drama “The Gingko Bed” helped to persuade South Korean conglomerate Samsung to support “Shiri” financially. Although it only cost $5 million to make--a relatively small sum compared with the budgets of most commercial movies made in the West--”Shiri” was the most expensive Korean film and one of its most ambitious.

Kang admits that trying to make a Hollywood-style action-drama with $5 million required careful budgeting. “I had to be really organized in spending money for the film,” he says. “For example, I had to check the number of extras we had and see if it was within our budget. Even [for] some of the shooting scenes, I would think that we can only use two bullets for a particular scene and no more than that.”

Korean Films Grow More Popular at Home

“Shiri” had a revolutionary effect on the South Korean film industry. Before the film’s release, American-made movies accounted for about 60% of the box-office receipts in South Korea. Korean movies pulled in about 20% of the audience and non-American foreign films accounted for the remaining 20%. Now South Korean films account for more than 48% of the movie-theater business in his home country while the audience share for American-made movies has shrunk to about 35%.

After “Shiri’s” popular success at home and in other parts of Asia (it was also a No. 1 box-office hit in Japan and Hong Kong), more entrepreneurs began to view South Korean films as attractive business ventures, Kang says.

“‘Shiri’ was a real turning point because it showed the potential to the Korean film industry that Korean movie-makers could make Hollywood-type movies,” Kang says. “The movie’s success in Japan and Hong Kong also made people think that Korean movies could [be successful] in foreign [markets]. Before, people thought that Korean movies were just for Korean people.”

With the relaxation of government censorship, South Korean cinema has flourished in recent years with first-rate mainstream genre movies, such as Kang Woo-Suk’s gritty and exciting “Two Cops,” and intensely personal films exemplified by the work of the veteran Im Kwon Taek, whose most recent film was the exquisite period fable “Chunhyang.” Along with Iran and Taiwan, Korea is now considered to be on the cutting edge of world cinema.

Since “Shiri” set box office records in its homeland, it has been surpassed by another South Korean film. Currently, the record holder for the country’s highest-grossing film is a male-bonding movie called “Friend.” South Korea’s new generation of filmmakers is starting to explore other themes such as homosexuality that were once deemed too sensitive for Korean audiences.

The Korean film industry is watching with significant interest to see how American audiences respond to “Shiri,” Kang says. But the film would appear to be an underdog in the United States. The project lacks names recognizable in the U.S., although Han Suk-Gyu (who plays counterintelligence agent Ryu) is one of South Korea’s most popular actors. Plus, it’s a foreign-language movie that in spirit is more of a commercial rather than an art-house film.

“I don’t have that many expectations that it’s going to be a No. 1 hit at the box office in America because Korean films haven’t really been introduced here before,” says Kang, who operates his own film production company. “We hope to provide a positive image to American viewers about what Korean movies are like. Hopefully, it will be a steppingstone for other Korean films and more will be introduced here in the future.”

Kang is writing a script for a “Shiri” sequel, which he says will be set in Russia and elsewhere in Europe. However, he is enlisting someone else to direct in an attempt to bring freshness to the sequel. He is also planning to write and direct three other films: a movie about the Korean War, a science-fiction project and a fantasy-love story involving Genghis Khan and his relationship with a Korean woman.