Korean Dream: The Nama-jinheung Mixtape

Using fragments from films produced by the now defunct Korean production company Nama-jinheung, Lee Taewoong captures the inner landscape of Koreans during the Cold War, an era of economic growth and a transforming nation.

Cinema Regained loved public broadcaster KBS’s documentary television series Modern Korea from its first season and has already presented episodes from the programme twice. The basic concept of the series is as simple as it is fabulous: it takes a critical look at the nation’s history through the prism of KBS’s own production. 

This year, the programme took a new turn by producing a whole season for cinema release, relying for the first time on other institutions’ materials. The project’s spiritus rector, producer-director Lee Taewoong, tackled the history of Nama-jinheung, a less prestigious production company especially active during the 1970s and ’80 whose output contains a concise history of South Korea during the later stages of the Cold War – a cinema often of subtle ideological contradiction where the narrative sometimes told one story and the aesthetic quite a different one. An exemplary exercise in appropriated footage filmmaking, Korean Dream: The Nama-jinheung Mixtape is also an invitation to discover this little discussed chapter of Korean film history!

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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