South Korean Film Awards & the Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

THE UGLY... one of 19 films competing to become the Oscar submission

Since we've just starting hearing about Oscar submission decisions from the 100+ countries that Oscar invites to participate each year, let's talk about a country that wisely invested in their own arts, with both deregulation and regulation tactics (reducing government censorship whilst protecting home-grown cinema from Hollywood dominance via screen quotas) for the past couple of decades. The results have been impressive and South Korean entertainment is big in multiple countries now, including the US. While their cinema has been popular and lauded for some time, the American Oscars haven’t quite come around, with the sole exception of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019). It helped that Parasite had a) absolutely exquisite timing of festivals-to-theater-to-awards pipeline and b) was easy to spot as an instant classic / masterpiece. The former is hard (though not impossible) to manage and the latter is exceedingly rare! 

We suspect that Oscar’s resistance to South Korean cinema has to do with the Academy's general genre-aversion...

Click to read more ...

TIFF '24: "By the Stream" could be a good introduction to the cinema of Hong Sang-soo

by Cláudio Alves

There's an odd comfort in seeking the new Hong Sang-soo film at any given festival. Thanks to the speed at which the Korean auteur runs through production, you'll usually find one. He regularly premieres multiple features every year. Earlier in 2024, he won the Silver Bear at Berlin with A Traveler's Needs. A few months later, he was at Locarno, ready to present his overall 32nd feature-length project, By the Stream, which took the Best Performance award for Kim Min-hee's work. This second project also made it to TIFF, delighting loyal fans with a new Hong that's much like all the other Hongs that came before. That's not a dig, merely a recognition of the director's remarkable consistency…

Click to read more ...

Three more Best International Film Contenders & Finalist Lists

by Nathaniel R

THREE KILOMETRES TO THE END OF THE WORLD © Vlad Dumitrescu

It's that time of year when countries are regularly announcing their Oscar submission. We started the week with 15 contenders but now we're at 18 and we have three new finalist lists, as well... 

Click to read more ...

International Feature Race - 15 Contenders Thus Far

by Nathaniel R

Though I know I've been absent from writing, I have been updating the International Feature Film Oscar charts to track the submissions. So far 15 countries have announced their submissions, some of which are available to US viewers. After the jump, the list so far, impending decisions from Israel and South Korea, and general observations...

Click to read more ...

TIFF '23: "Concrete Utopia" is an earth-shaking blockbuster parable

by Cláudio Alves

Genre cinema has long been the home of social critique through allegory. Think back to Godzilla's reflection on Japan's atomic trauma or Night of the Living Dead's invention of the zombie movie as the place to study civilization's collapse. South Korea's new Oscar submission, Concrete Utopia, follows the tradition. Though, here, you'll find no Romero undead or radioactive kaiju to distract and reflect human folly at the viewer. Instead, Tae-hwa Eom's latest tackles the precepts of the disaster flick with a dash of post-apocalyptic dystopia, showing Humanity's self-made ruin in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that renders Seoul a wasteland…

Click to read more ...