Introduction

Domestically South Korean cinema has seen remarkable growth over the last two decades. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, audiences on average saw four films per year while admissions to Korean films have surpassed 100 million a year since 2012. In 2019, box office sales in Korea made it the fourth biggest market in the world after North America, China, and Japan. Overseas, the unprecedented success of Parasite (Gisaengchung, Bong Joon Ho, 2019) has underscored Korea's growing cinematic profile on the world stage. It also reconfirms how reliant the industry is on the Korean auteurs to drive its sales. Festivals, of course, have played a crucial role in this regard as Parasite illustrates, having won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 before going on to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards in February 2020.

More than twenty years earlier Kim Ki-young was a precursor to what would ultimately later follow. In 1997, the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) curated a retrospective of his work that screened eight of his works. The festival, which was then in its second year, had programmed a section dedicated to older Korean films that continued through its subsequent editions until 2019. Today the festival is renowned for its extensive focus on new discoveries, as evidenced by the exposure it afforded Park Jung-bum's The Journals of Musan (Musan ilgi, Park Jung-bum, 2011) or more recently Kim Bora's House of Hummingbird (Beol-sae, Kim Bora, 2018). However, one of the most interesting areas of the festival programming in its infancy was the showcasing of established and “forgotten” filmmakers, and a prime example of this concern was the Kim Ki-young retrospective titled “Kim Ki-young: Rediscovering a Director from the Past.” Soojeong Ahn writes in her text on the festival, The Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization, that through this retrospective, Kim became the first South Korean filmmaker to receive international recognition. The Berlin Film Festival just four months later also put together a retrospective of Kim's work following the enthusiasm in Busan, screening four of his films in the forum section.