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Since 1999 South Korean films have drawn roughly 40 to 60 percent of the Korean domestic box office, matching or even surpassing Hollywood films in popularity. How did this Korean “film explosion” come about? This book examines the Korean film industry’s success story from the viewpoint of a group of unlikely social actors-Korean independent filmmakers. It investigates the unexpected alliances among independent filmmakers, the state, and the mainstream film industry practitioners under the postauthoritarian administrations of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), and argues that these alliances were critical to the making of the Korean film sector as we know it. During this postauthoritarian/reform era, independent filmmakers with activist backgrounds who were part of the “democratic generation” or “3–8-6 generation” were able to mobilize the cultural repertoires and networks of their 1980s activism in turning themselves into important players in state cultural institutions. They also negotiated with the purveyors of capital and helped lead national protests against trade liberalization. Instead of simply labeling these alliances with the state, capitalists, and film industry practitioners as “selling out” or “co-optation,” the book explores how independent filmmakers transformed South Korea’s film institutions, policies, and narratives about film. This book is an ethnographic investigation of the political, social, and cultural contexts that created the Korean “film explosion.”

John Sayles is the very paradigm of the contemporary independent filmmaker. By raising much of the funding for his films himself, Sayles functions more independently than most directors, and he has used his freedom to write and produce films with a distinctive personal style and often clearly expressed political positions. From The Return of the Secaucus Seven to Sunshine State, his films have consistently expressed progressive political positions on issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. This book examines the defining characteristic of Sayles' cinema: its realism. Positing the filmmaker as a critical realist, the book explores Sayles' attention to narrative in critically acclaimed and popular films such as Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star. The study also details the conditions under which Sayles' films have been produced, distributed, and exhibited, affecting the way in which these films have been understood and appreciated. In the process, the book presents Sayles as a teacher who tells historically accurate stories that invite audiences to consider the human world they all inhabit.

This study investigates the controversial motion pictures written and directed by the independent filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, one of the most acclaimed Korean auteurs in the English-speaking world. Propelled by underdog protagonists who can only communicate through shared corporeal pain and extreme violence, Kim's graphic films have been classified by Western audiences as belonging to sensationalist East Asian “extreme” cinema, and Kim has been labeled a “psychopath” and “misogynist” in South Korea. Drawing upon both Korean-language and English-language sources, the book challenges these misunderstandings, recuperating Kim's oeuvre as a therapeutic, yet brutal cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment (political anger and resentment deriving from subordination and oppression). The book argues that the power of Kim's cinema lies precisely in its ability to capture, channel, and convey the raw emotions of protagonists who live on the bottom rungs of Korean society. It provides historical and postcolonial readings of victimization and violence in Kim's cinema, which tackles such socially relevant topics as national division in Wild Animals and The Coast Guard and U.S. military occupation in Address Unknown. The book also explores the religious and spiritual themes in Kim's most recent works, which suggest possibilities of reconciliation and transcendence.