Contemporary Korean Cinema: Challenges and the Transformation of ‘Planet Hallyuwood’

This article examines how the South Korean cinema has undergone a transformation from an ‘antiquated cottage industry’ in the 1980s into a thriving international cinema – albeit with a host of new challenges and tensions – in the ‘post-boom’ years of the 2000s right up to the present. Its analysis of film culture in the 1980s sets the stage for the Korean cinema’s transnational development over the last decade, and points to a longer historical continuum involving the ‘re-emergence’ in the 1980s of a ‘cinema of quality’ that was marked by widespread critical acclaim. Additionally, this article canvasses the key issues and concerns addressed in the thought-provoking pieces included in this special themed issue of Acta Koreana and how they elaborate on the dynamic and complex links between the Korean cinema’s pioneering developments in the aesthetic, textual, industry, audience, critical, policy and historical fields, and their impact on the transformation of what we have come to call ‘Planet Hallyuwood’.