KIM KI-YOUNG X2

Series Site

After two decades of increasing popular and critical success, South Korean cinema today seems to have conquered the world—but those breakthroughs of recent years didn’t just come out of nowhere, and there’s a long winding road lined with excellent films that leads to Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. One period especially ripe for rediscovery is the golden age of 1960s South Korean cinema, when Pyongyang-born Kim Ki-young was among the most consistently inventive, stylistically sophisticated, and psychologically acute working directors, turning out intense psychodramas like the sultry, noir-inflected The Housemaid—one of Bong’s inspirations for Parasite—and Goryoejang, the devastating tale of a peasant farmer’s rebellion against tradition. Both will be at Metrograph, and offer a perfect introduction to the filmmaker that Cahiers du cinéma’s Jean-Michel Frodon called “a truly extraordinary image maker.”