Coming solely three years after the Palme d’Or for “Parasite,” the two Cannes prizes for Park Chan-wook as finest director and for Music Kang-ho as finest actor are additional proof of the energy of Korean cinema’s originality, its elevated expertise and its resilience.
Korean motion pictures have been briefly overshadowed by Ok-pop and Korean TV dramas – suppose BTS and “Squid Sport” – each of which flourished throughout the COVID period, whereas Korean movie was struck down by the pandemic.
Closed cinemas and disrupted launch schedules meant that the movie sector was not absolutely in a position to capitalize on the 2019 Cannes and a number of Oscar successes of “Parasite” and “Minari.” Korean movie producers’ revenues crumbled between 2020 and early 2022. Expertise from in entrance of and behind the digital camera shifted throughout to the extra vibrant streaming sector.
The Cannes prize for Park’s “Resolution to Depart” is significantly satisfying for a core group of filmmakers, that additionally contains “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho, who’ve engaged with streaming platforms, however see themselves as filmmakers first.
This significantly tight cluster of main names consists of a group who’re associates slightly than rivals. Whereas they are often categorized as big-name auteurs with filmographies that make them out as writer-director-producers, the actuality is extra collegial. Park, his youthful brother, Bong and a small circle of different buddies grew up supporting one another. And so they proceed to learn one another’s scripts and share notes exterior of the formal studio construction.
Saturday’s Cannes wins are additionally vindication for Korean leisure large CJ ENM, which was partly accountable for Korean tradition’s trendy incarnation, and which has been in the Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho enterprise for greater than twenty years.
CJ ENM was a founder investor in DreamWorks SKG in 1995 and then discovered itself doubling down in the sector as a pioneer distributor in Korea and builder of the nation’s first multiplex cinemas.
Having created the distribution capability and exhibition infrastructure, the firm discovered itself more and more pulled into manufacturing and manufacturing finance, needing to maintain the function movies flowing, meet the authorities’s content material quotas and industrialize a enterprise that hardly existed a decade earlier.
Guided by an idiosyncratic totem, in Miky Lee, CJ ENM has succeeded in that endeavor by trusting auteurs and attuning itself to the excessive requirements demanded by Korean native audiences. It has grown with the expertise, as the nation’s artistic industries emerged from the lengthy shadow of army rule and changed austerity with the ‘Korean Wave’ and Ok-cool.
CJ Leisure was a producer of Park’s 2000 breakout movie “Joint Safety Space,” and financier of his astonishing 2003 image “Oldboy,” which gained Cannes’ second prize, the Grand Prix. CJ was additionally aboard Bong’s second title “Barking Canine By no means Chew” in 2000 and his “Recollections of Homicide” in 2003.
CJ jumped on board when Bong created his futuristic “Snowpiercer” prepare experience in 2013. It was one of the costliest Korean movies of all instances and the firm needed to stretch itself financially to accommodate.
Guided by the success of the English-language “Snowpiercer sequence,” which is now in its fourth season, CJ ENM has rising ambitions in the worldwide TV enterprise. In the final two years it has invested in Skydance Media and Endeavor Content material.
But it surely should certainly have been simply as satisfying, mid approach via the Cannes Market, for CJ to have the ability to announce document ranges of rights gross sales for its two function movies in competitors: “Resolution” (191 territories) and “Dealer” (171 territories).
