Since the 1990s, South Korean films have “drawn roughly 40 to 60 percent of the Korean domestic box office, matching or often even surpassing Hollywood films in popularity” (p. 1). How did this Korean film explosion come about? It is tempting to credit acclaimed directors such as Park Chan-wook of Oldboy (2003) fame or Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations' championing of Korean film as a “strategic national industry” in the new millennium. Young-a Park finds a less likely but equally compelling explanation in the opening up of new film institutions and spaces by activist independent filmmakers.
Park points out how theorization around cinema and globalization has been structured in terms of conventional binaries of the “West” versus “non-West” (or “indigenous”) and “commercial” versus “non-commercial.” Elided within these binaries is the commercial success of non-Western film industries such as Bollywood and “New Korean Cinema” that are “innovative in style, socially...
