Freddie (Park Ji-min) is a social hand grenade, flinging herself into situations to see where the splinters fall. Born in Korea but adopted and raised by French parents, a seemingly impulsive, brief detour to Seoul sees her seek out her birth-parents.
The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda chose to make Broker in South Korea, with Parasite star, Song Kang-ho. He plays one of two dodgy chaps who make a living selling abandoned babies to desperate couples.
Even those with the most tangential connection to pop music will be aware that K-Pop is all conquering, and the likes of BTS and BlackPink are on some metrics the most successful of recent acts anywhere. But at the same time, there is also a growing awareness that there is a burgeoning Korean indie and art music scene, the flames of which have been fanned by what has become one of London’s most interesting and enterprising annual festivals, K-Music.
A minute before coming on stage, the audience is asked to observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the Halloween tragedy in the central Itaewon district of the South Korean capital of Seoul.
In Park Chan-wook’s strange Cannes prize-winning thriller, a husband is discovered mangled beneath a mountain, and pretty widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t noticeably upset.
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Korean woman, Sangok (Lee Hyeyoung), are caught in scenes which feel like real time in Hong Sangsoo’s latest. Moments and personal connections fall in and out of focus, the film seems sober then drunk. Hong learned from old masters such as Robert Bresson, and there is a similar spiritual focus to objectively small, ineffable moments in his 26th film of a prize-winning career.
Remember Gangnam Style, the music video that went viral in 2012? PSY’s cheeky lyrics and daft moves attracted 1.6 billion hits on YouTube, sparked dozens of parodies and turned the world on to K-pop. And that was just the beginning; K-pop has since mushroomed into a global phenomenon characterised by catchy tunes and fast-paced dance routines performed by beautiful young people in snappy outfits.
This album – and its already multi-100 million stream single “Pink Venom” – starts off with a twang of Korean traditional instruments, a background chant of “blaaaackpink”, a monumentally crunching hip hop beat and – OH DEAR GOD ARE THEY DOING A JAMAICAN ACCENT? Well yes, Korean pop gigastar Jennie of Blackpink does indeed start their second album with a patois-inflected “kick in the door, waving the Coco”. Amazingly that’s not even the weirdest thing about the opening either.
Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Suddenly, South Korea is beginning to look like a powerhouse in the making, with consecutive big ratings hits with Squid Game and now Hellbound.
The Korean-American writer Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, currently enjoying its UK debut at Southwark Playhouse, is presented within a frame that cleverly and radically alters what’s inside it.