In May, the Film Center at the School for the Arts Institute of Chicago presented the package, which then traveled in June to San Francisco's Castro Theater courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society, before ending this month at the Pacific Film Archive. Programmers at all three venues helped, with the Korean Film Archive, to organize the event. Resurgence of interest began last year at the 2nd Pusan International Film Festival, which hosted a more complete retrospective that included the first English-language book on the filmmaker. Kwon-taek at the 1998 San Francisco International Film Festival, but also last year's Im retrospective in Los Angeles, which the University of Southern California's School of Cinema presented with the Korean Studies Institute, further educating the masses about Korean cinema.
Much education still needs to be done.
Truly a national artist, Im is also admired for telling these stories on a very human and universally accessible level, making them popular abroad as well as at home. It was only in the past decade that Korean cinema found a fresh voice, since the government had kept the film industry highly regulated and heavily censored for almost half a century. Quality eroded even more quickly under quota policies like those of totalitarian president Park Chung-hee who, in the late '70s, stipulated that for every foreign film a Korean movie company wanted to import, it had to produce and release four Korean films. Trademark, Copyright and Disclaimer . Part of the GMD Studios online family.