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Post-Burden Or New Burden Korean Cinema?: Outside Looking In At The Latest Golden Age, 1996-?, Brian M. Yecies

Dr Brian Yecies

This work-in-progress examines the paradoxical nature of what I call Koreas post-burden cinema a present-day film industry that has survived Japanese colonialism, American occupation, civil war, prolonged dictatorship, rapid industrialization, economic crisis and severe censorship. For nearly a century filmmakers have learned and practised their trade under these challenging social, political, cultural, economic and industrial constraints, and outlived them. This paper uses a case study of The President's Last Bang to illustrate the divergent freedoms that have enabled representative commercial, art-house, independent and animation filmmakers to transcend national and cultural borders by telling previouslyforbidden stories and breathing a universal but …