As shown by the success of Squid Game and Parasite, South Korea’s film industry is producing films and original series for streaming services, film studios, and television stations worldwide. South Korea is now arguably considered one of the few countries outside the United States to have captivated the world’s hearts and minds through pop music, TV dramas, and film. Similarly, the exponential growth in the South Korean film industry has been mirrored by a growing body of industry and film policy forums and academic conferences in both the East and the West.
The South Korean Film Industry is the first detailed scholarly overview of the South Korean film industry. Contributors explore the major changes in South Korean filmmaking, marketing, and in the international growth and popularity of South Korean films. By bringing together a wide range of academic specialists, The South Korean Film Industry situates the current scholarship on South Korean cinema within the ongoing theoretical debates in contemporary global film studies.
Join us for a discussion about the South Korean cinema industry with contributors Nikki J.Y. Lee, Simone Chung, Jason Bechervaise, Daniel Martin, Andrew Jackson, Joyce Cho, and three of the volume’s editors, Sangjoon Lee, Dal Yong Jin, and Junhyoung Cho.
Editors
Sangjoon Lee is an Associate Professor of Asian cinema at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media. Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (2020) and the editor/co-editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (2015), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (2019), Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas (2024), The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (2024), and The South Korean Film Industry (2024).
Dal Yong Jin is Distinguished SFU Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of numerous books, including Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (2010), New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media (2016), Transnational Korean Cinema: Cultural Politics, Film Genres, and Digital Technologies (2019), Transmedia Storytelling in East Asia (2020), and Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture: Transmedia Storytelling, Digital Platforms, and Genres (2022).
Junhyoung Cho is the chief researcher for the Korean Film Archive. His research interests cover Korean film history, Korean film policies, and industries. After joining the Korean Film Archive, he published a book about Shin Film, a major Korean film company in the 1960s and 1970s, and published articles on Korean film directors Yi Man-hŭi, Han Hyŏngmo, and Ha Kilchong.
Contributors
Jason Bechervaise (Hanyang University)
Andrew David Jackson (Monash University)
Joyce Heeyoung Cho (Chung-Ang University)
Daniel Martin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology)
Nikki J.Y. Lee (Nottingham Trent University)
Simone Shu-Yeng Chung (Université Grenoble Alpes)
