London Korean Film Festival – Edinburgh

Aimless Bullet is Yu Hyun-mok’s most exem­plary work and a key piece of Korean realist cinema. The film captures the collective anxiety of post-war Korea through clerk Cheol-ho and his family. A commercial failure upon its ini­tial release, it was soon banned by the military government, finally receiving its due recognition when presented at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1963. Since then the film has gained legendary status in Korea as a clas­sic awaiting rediscovery.

Episodic, meandering and offering the mere ghost of a narrative, the film, too, is neither this nor that – but the apparent simplicity of Hong’s monochromatic long takes conceals a theatricalised artifice whose players may merely be A-reum’s fictions, or even lost souls.

Kim Ki-young showed in The Housemaid (1960) that in the hands of a master of suspense a stairway could take on a malevolent life of its own. Lee Man-hee’s atmospheric noir has two. Kim Jin-kyu often played sober, middle-class professionals, men born to wear suits. In this psycho-thriller the respectability of his Dr Hyeon will be peeled away from him layer by painful layer.

This screening will be introduced by Dr David Sorfa. Dr David Sorfa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh