Join us on a crash course through South Korean cinema, but don’t expect your typical 101 film history course! We’ll unpack significant themes, stylistic tendencies, and moments in South Korean cinema through an eclectic selection of films from the 1960s to the 2020s. We’ll interrogate exactly what “Korean film” is as we traverse its relationships to history and politics, gender and sex, transnational flows of capital, and more. Each workshop will include a hearty mix of lecture, group discussion, and live film analysis. No previous familiarity with Korean film, language, or history is required to enjoy—everyone will walk away from our series armed with a list of new films to explore and new insights for appreciating them.

To follow along, take care to watch the main film for each week on your own before coming to class. We’ll also engage with clips from supplementary films, which the most gungho are welcome to watch before class as well. Almost all course films are available to stream for free, and all are available to rent from Scarecrow Video.

Module 1: Precarity – August 4th, 2025

What is South Korean cinema? To open our course, we will begin conceptualizing the stylistic tendencies, genres, and concerns that connect South Korean films today. To do so, we will consider three films that center the issue of precarity (political, economic, and social): Park Chan-wook’s box office-smashing Joint Security Area (2000), Bong Joon-ho’s globally historic Parasite (2019), and Jeong Jae-eun’s pathbreaking classic Take Care of My Cat (2001).

• Week’s Film: Joint Security Area can be rented from Scarecrow Video or streamed on Kanopy for free with most public library cards (content: violence and depiction of suicide).
• Supplementary Viewing: Parasite can be streamed for free via Kanopy and Take Care of My Cat via Hoopla with most public library cards. Both are available to rent from Scarecrow Video.

Module 2: History on Film – August 11th, 2025

The past hundred years on the Korean peninsula are some of the most tumultuous of any place in the world—and cinema has been intertwined with this history since the medium’s arrival in Korea. In week two, we will briefly overview Korean political and film history to explore the following questions: How have Korean history and politics shaped the course of Korean filmmaking, and vice versa? How has filmmaking functioned to remember, rebel against, and reimagine the political world of South Korea? To do so, we will take a look at the post-war masterpiece Aimless Bullet (1961), the cheekily dissident filmmaking of March of Fools (1975), and the groundbreaking documentary Habitual Sadness (1997).

• Week’s Film: Aimless Bullet is available to watch with English subtitles on YouTube (content: discussion of and depiction of suicide).
• Supplementary Viewing: March of Fools is available to watch with English subtitles on YouTube (content: depiction of suicide). Habitual Sadness can be rented from Scarecrow Video and is not available for streaming in the United States (content: discussions of rape and sexual violence).

Module 3: Gender and Sex – August 18th, 2025

Gender and sex have long been tangled up in Korean filmmaking, both on- and off-screen. From the industry’s historical exclusion of female filmmakers, to the glorification of certain archetypal male characters over passive female characters, to the queer-coded subversion of heteronormativity, to the controversy around films that explore feminism in a #MeToo era… gender and sex are everywhere in South Korean cinema. This week, we will tread deeper into these murky waters to think more expansively about gender and sexuality in South Korean films. To do so, we will watch auteur Kim Ki-young’s psychosexual and supernatural drama Io Island (1977) to explore the dynamics between “men,” “women” and beyond. As well, we will unpack the queer revenge story of Memento Mori (1999), parse the heated discussions around the “#MeToo film” Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (2019), and sample the exciting subversion of patriarchal filmmaking achieved by Korea’s first feminist film collective, Kaidu Club.

• Week’s Film: Io Island is available to rent from Scarecrow Video (content: depictions of sexual assault between minors and necrophilia). 
• Supplementary Viewing: Memento Mori (content: depiction of suicide and discussion of sexual abuse of a minor) and Kim Ji-yung, Born 1982 can be rented from Scarecrow Video or streamed for free on Kanopy with most public library cards.

Module 4: “Asia Extreme” – August 25th, 2025

All of us are watching this course’s South Korean films in the United States. How did this come to be? In week four, we will investigate how Asian cinema—and Korean films in particular—has come to be marketed, circulated, and consumed abroad under the quasi-genre of “Asia Extreme.” But what else is Korean cinema besides “extreme,” why is it sometimes so extreme, and how does it reckon with extreme themes using tools besides gore and violence? To begin thinking about Korean cinema within and beyond a transnational flow of capital, we will discuss such films as the genre-defying cult hit Save the Green Planet! (2003), the “Asia Extreme” cornerstone Oldboy (2003), and the subtle and clever Microhabitat (2017).

• Week’s Film: Save the Green Planet! can be rented from Scarecrow Video or streamed for free on Kanopy with most public library cards (content: violence, gore, and disturbing archival footage of World War II atrocities).
• Supplementary Viewing: Oldboy (content: gore, discussions and depictions of sexual violence) and Microhabitat can be rented from Scarecrow Video or streamed for free on Kanopy with most public library cards.