After a turbulent year from 1979-1980, which included the assassination of president Park Chung Hee, the Coup d'état of December Twelfth, and the Gwangju massacre, South Korea began taking greater steps towards an open democracy. Though theater attendance remained low throughout the 1980s, the government's gradual relaxation of censorship and control over the film industry enabled the production of more adventurous and interesting movies. During this decade, South Korean film began reaching an international audience for the first time, in large part through the recognition of director Im Kwon-taek's work.

In 1988, president Roh Tae-woo began the gradual elimination of the government censorship of political expression in films. Directors were quick to begin re-exploring social and political themes in their films.

During this period, however, the audience for domestic films reached a low-point, due in no small part to the opening of the market to films from overseas, especially the United States and Hong Kong. By 1993, only 16% of the films seen by South Korean audiences were made domestically. The local film industry persevered through this lean period, and it was at this time that events were set in place for the impressive success Korean cinema was to enjoy during the next decade.

Breakthrough
Today South Korea is one of the few countries where Hollywood productions do not enjoy a dominant share of the domestic market.

The 1999 film Shiri about a North Korean spy preparing a coup in Seoul was the first in Korean history to sell more than 2 million tickets in Seoul alone. This helped Shiri to surpass box office hits such as Titanic, The Matrix and Star Wars. The success of Shiri motivated other Korean films with large budgets for Korean circumstances.

In 2000 the film JSA (Joint Security Area) was a huge success and even surpassed the benchmark set by Shiri. One year later, the film Friend managed the same. In South Korea the romantic comedy My Sassy Girl outsold The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter which ran at the same time. As of 2004 new films continue to outperform older releases, and many Korean productions are more popular than Hollywood films. Both Silmido and Taegukgi were watched by over 10 million people per film, which is a quarter of the Korean population. Silmido is a film based on a true story about a secret special force. The other is a blockbuster movie about Korean War directed by the director of Shiri.

This success attracted the attention of Hollywood. Films such as Shiri are now distributed in the USA. In 2001, Miramax even bought the rights to an Americanized remake of the successful Korean action comedy movie, My Wife is a Gangster.

The 2003 suspense thriller Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters) was successful as well, leading Dreamworks to pay $2 million (US) for the rights to a remake, topping the $1 million (US) paid for the Japanese movie The Ring.

Many Korean films reflect how much the Korean people long for reunification and suffer from the division of the peninsula. Many of the films underline feelings, which causes Korean films to be likened to French films. The Korean film industry, however, now produces all genres with widely varying themes.

Festival success
Korean film first garnered serious international recognition in 2002 at the Venice Film Festival when the film Oasis won the second prize award. The film not only revealed much about traditional Korean culture, but also highlighted the plight of handicapped Koreans and the general public's inability to understand and accept them. In the story an isolated young woman with cerebral palsy falls in love with a simple minded man who has recently completed a term in prison for the hit and run accident that killed her father. Quite possibly Korea's most symbolic and rich film to date, "Oasis" remains the turning point for Korean avante garde film.

Oldboy is the second great victory for Korean film when it came in second place in the Cannes Film Festival, second to Fahrenheit 9/11. The story traces the life of a man who is put into solitary confinement by someone he does not know. He lives there for many years until he is released to find out the bizarre reason for his cruel entrapment. Dark and gloomy, Oldboy experiments with the themes of psychological madness and sexual distortions that exist in Korean modernity. The title is itself an oxymoron that speaks of the boyish innocence with which old Korean culture seeks to grapple with the psychosis of modern life.

In February 2004, the controversial director, Kim Ki Duk won the award for best director at the 54th annual Berlin Film Festival. He was awarded for the film Samaria which is about a teenage prostitute.

New wave films
There are three important dates in new wave Korean films: first in 1992, "Marriage Story was financed by Samsung, marking the first non-government funded film. In 1999, Shiri was released and led to Korean films taking over 50% of the local market. Ultimately, My Sassy Girl became the most popular and exportable Korean film in history. Each has brought new strength to the unique creation of a Korean film industry that no longer copies Hollywood verbatim. Supporting the Korean film industry have been strong government controls against copying and bootlegging and piracy, which have allowed the film industry to bring out many films, and make a profit and still have very strong DVD and aftermarket sales. In addition, a government-enforced screen quota system since 1967 has limited the number of days per year non-domestic movies can be shown on any one movie screen in South Korea. Recently, this practice has come under fire from non-Korean film distributors as unfair.[10] Fast low cost films with likeable stars, tied to current events, and at affordable prices that speak in a natural vernacular with state of the art cinematography and music have all pushed films ahead.

New wave Korean films came as a result of competition in the film industry, directors trained outside of the USA (in France, Spain, the Netherlands, China and Europe), and new models of scripts that included more Korean situations, and spoke in contemporary vernacular, and used younger actors, younger scriptwriters, and less formulaic Hollywood cliches or 90 minute frames. The impact of the Busan Film Festival and Jeonju Film Festival in screening year after year hundreds of new European, Canadian, South American, Chinese and even Japanese films rewrote the basic templates towards originality.

The increase in competition created more films, faster and unpredictable unique story-lines that were clever and aggressive. Films in turn influenced very quickly traditional Korean network soap operas, and forced a very fast new design in television story-lines, and this then forced even greater innovation in Korean film-making with even stronger writing and higher definition of the art.

From Wikkipedia