Modern Korea: The Age of Beasts
An investigation into the way Korean television presented discrimination and violence against women in teleplays and news items.
48'
South Korea
IFFR 2022
Korean Ghost Stories was a popular TV series telling tales of the eerie and the uncanny. This episode took its inspiration from a legend that originated on Cheju island, whose inhabitants claim that fishermen who vanished around Socora Rock were now in Ieodo, an empire ruled by women who didn’t allow any man to leave. The legend, it seems, was popular in the 1970s.
Celebrated writer Yi Ch’ongchun published a novel based on it in 1974, which was adapted for cinema three years later by grandmaster Kim Kiyǒng. However, teleplay auteur Choi Sangsik’s version of the Ieodo Island legend has nothing to do with Yi’s book; his is a melancholic tale about the joys and sorrows of common people vis-a-vis a strange utopian matriarchy. We chose Korean Ghost Stories – ieodo to screen alongside Modern Korea: The Age of Beasts on the suggestion of its producer-director, Jeong Jaeeun, who quotes extensively and lovingly from it.
See also: Modern Korea: The Age of Beasts
IFFR 2022
An investigation into the way Korean television presented discrimination and violence against women in teleplays and news items.
48'
South Korea
IFFR 2022
Programme IFFR 2022
A sphere of collective remembrance and imagination offering restored classics, documentaries on film culture, and explorations of cinema’s heritage.
Read more about this programmeStudents' daily life turns into an anxiety-riddled existentialist vision of atomic overkill. A masterpiece of modernist poetics!
90'
ČSSR
IFFR 2022
Version of a popular folk tale about a mysterious island realm ruled by women. A rare treasure of television!
69'
South Korea
IFFR 2022
Scenes from the life of a lonely elderly lady in utterly bizarre situations. A masterpiece hopscotching between surrealism and cinema vérité.
76'
Hungary
IFFR 2022