They marry in secret, but when Mongryong is away in Seoul, a new governor comes to the village and demands Chunhyang as his. When she refuses, she is beaten and sentenced to death. Her only hope is that Mongryong return in time to save her. The story is fairly straightforward, plotting is minimal, and the use of pansori in telling the story distances us from the protagonists' struggle. Struggling through an iffy translation and Im's taciturn demeanor, what follows is our conversation about Korean film crossover, feminism and the art of pansori.
Korean films have yet to establish their own identity for international audiences.
I am still amazed, in fact. One of the reasons Korean films fail to gain recognition with foreign audiences is because films from certain countries, say Chinese and Iranian, have become a distinctive genre in and of themselves. The popularity of these countries' cinema is why it's sometimes hard to draw peoples' attention to Korean films. Korean films have yet to establish their own identity for international audiences. It has, in fact, been adapted for the cinema fourteen times before my version.