korean new wave

South Korea's Constitutional Court issued a declaration in 1996 that struck down the state's pre-release censorship board as unconstitutional, and by 1998 the government had let censorship go for good, put subsidy money behind the industry, and kept a screen quota in place to hold off Hollywood at the box office. What the lifted censorship and the quota bought first was procedural confidence: Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder spends its length on two provincial detectives working the country's first serial murder case. Parasite spends the same confidence on comedy, an unemployed family working its way into a rich household. Park Chan-wook's Oldboy takes it furthest into genre, a man let out with no explanation for fifteen years of imprisonment. Lee Chang-dong's Poetry turns the same freedom toward quiet instead, enrolling a woman in her sixties in a poetry class while her memory goes and her grandson does something unforgivable. The films run comedy into procedural into horror inside one unbroken long take, with no cut to warn you the genre is about to change.

Distinguish from Japanese New Wave is an earlier East Asian new wave (1960s) with a more politically radical, formally experimental orientation. The Korean New Wave is more genre-engaged and commercially viable while maintaining artistic ambition.