Im Kwon-taek

▪ 2003

      In May 2002 South Korean motion-picture director Im Kwon-taek won the best director award at the Cannes International Film Festival for Chihwaseon (2002), a masterly depiction of the life of legendary 19th-century Korean artist Jang Seung-up. Despite having made nearly 100 films over the course of four decades and having earned a reputation as the “father of Korean cinema,” Im was relatively unknown to most filmgoers in the West; Time magazine described him as “the most famous director you've never heard of.” His triumph at Cannes—which marked the first time that a Korean director had received the award—brought him much-deserved recognition as well as helped garner the often overlooked Korean film industry worldwide attention.

      Im was born May 2, 1936, in Jansung, Cholla province, Korea. His father's death forced him to drop out of middle school, after which he eventually found work as a production assistant for a film company in Seoul. In 1962 he made his directorial debut with Farewell to the Duman River. Over the next 10 years, Im turned out some 50 movies, most of them B movies such as The Two Revengeful Hunchbacks (1971) and Don't Torture Me Anymore (1971).

      Although his original ambition had been to direct Hollywood-style action films and comedies, Im came to realize that he would always be hampered in this pursuit by limited financial and technical resources. Instead of trying to “compete with Hollywood,” he decided to focus on creating films that were uniquely Korean, exploring the country's history and traditional culture. The movies that followed were not often great box-office successes, but they consistently earned critical praise. These included Genealogy (1978), a historical drama that dealt with the Japanese occupation of Korea; Daughter of the Flames (1983), which portrayed the shamanistic folk religion Dong-hak; Sopyonje (1993), about a family of pansori (folk opera) singers; and the Korean War epic Taebaek Mountains (1994).

      Critics praised Chihwaseon for its imaginative re-creation of the turbulent life of Jang Seung-up, an amazingly gifted but self-destructive painter, and for the film's richly detailed look at the last years of the Choson dynasty. After Im took the best director award at Cannes, another honour came his way later in the year. At a ceremony in Paris on November 25, he was presented the UNESCO Fellini Gold Medal, awarded annually to directors whose films focused on peace and culture. Im's other awards included the 1997 Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for arts and culture and the San Francisco International Film Festival's 1998 Akira Kurosawa Award.

Sherman Hollar

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