1. Kim Ki-young was a South Korean film director, known for his intensely psychosexual and melodramatic horror films, often focusing on the psychology of their female characters.
38 Facts About Kim Ki-young
1. 2.
Nevertheless, working independently, Kim Ki-young produced some of his most eccentric cinematic creations in this era.
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Kim Ki-young was preparing a comeback film when he and his wife were killed in a house fire in 1998.
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Kim Ki-young's family had lived in Seoul for several generations, and his grandfather was a guard at Gwanghwamun.
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Kim Ki-young's father, Kim Seok-jin, was an English teacher, and his mother, Han Jin-cho, was a teacher and a graduate of Gyeonggi Women's College.
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The family had two daughters, and Kim Ki-young was their only son.
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Kim Ki-young's sister's encouraged the young Kim to develop his own creativity.
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At Pyongyang National High School, Kim Ki-young showed exceptional talent in music, painting and writing, and his studious nature earned him the nickname "Professor of Physics".
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When he failed to gain admittance, Kim Ki-young moved to Japan, planning to study and save up money to reapply for medical school.
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Kim Ki-young often went to Kyoto, where he attended many stage productions and saw many international films.
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Kim Ki-young returned to Korea in 1941, initially planning to work as a dentist, but instead immersing himself in the study of drama.
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Kim Ki-young returned to Pyongyang where he studied Stanislavsky's theories of acting and founded a theatrical group called "The Little Orchid".
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In 1946 Kim Ki-young enrolled in Seoul Medical School, Seoul National University, and graduated with a major in dentistry in 1950.
14.
Kim Ki-young founded the National University Theater in 1949, and with this group staged many works of the Western theater, including Ibsen's Ghosts, Capek's Robots, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and works by Chekhov and O'Neill.
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The main actress Kim Ki-young worked with while at the university was Kim Ki-young Yu-bong, who would later become his wife.
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Kim Ki-young was an intern at Seoul University Medical Clinic when the Korean War broke out.
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Kim Ki-young went to Pusan on June 1,1951, the day the North Korean army retreated.
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In Pusan, Kim Ki-young met Oh Young-jin, a fellow Pyongyang National High School graduate.
19.
Oh, who would later write the screenplay to the popular film The Wedding Day, was producing newsreels for the Korean News through the Bureau of Public Information, and helped Kim Ki-young get a job writing screenplays with this organization.
20.
Kim Ki-young Yu-bong supported her husband's filmmaking career through her dental practice, giving him a unique degree of independence among Korean filmmakers of his era to pursue his own personal visions.
21.
The training and equipment Kim Ki-young gained while working on these propaganda newsreels for the USI.
22.
Kim Ki-young used expired film stock and a manually operated camera from the USI.
23.
In 1957, Kim Ki-young was living near the red-light district of Yongsan, and the atmosphere of this neighborhood influenced his films, A Woman's War and Twilight Train.
24.
Kim Ki-young kills the composer's son, and then persuades the composer to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison.
25.
Kim Ki-young solidified his break with cinematic realism by following The Housemaid with two more films exploring styles and mixing genres, radically new for Korean cinema at the time.
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The box-office success of this film enabled Kim Ki-young to buy his first house, in the Namsan district of Seoul.
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Goryeojang, dealt with a similar subject matter as The Ballad of Narayama, directed by Shohei Imamura, a filmmaker with whom Kim Ki-young has often been compared.
28.
Kim Ki-young working independently in B-movie-like genre films, began to produce some of his most innovative and personal works at this time.
29.
Kim Ki-young fully regained his auteurist spirit with Woman of Fire, the second of his Housemaid trilogy.
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Not only popular with the critics, Kim Ki-young's independently produced films were box-office successes during this era in which most films were harmed through heavy governmental interference.
31.
Kim Ki-young filmed Ban Geum-ryeon in 1975, but it was banned at the time, and not released until 1981, with 40 minutes of footage censored.
32.
The government coerced Kim Ki-young into making an anti-Communist propaganda film.
33.
Kim Ki-young would shut himself up in a cheap hotel, listen to neighborhood gossip, and write all night in the dark.
34.
South Korean film critic Lee Young-il remembers that Kim Ki-young's shoes were never shined, and that one of his few material pleasures was gourmet coffee.
35.
However, by the 1980s Kim Ki-young's career had fallen into neglect.
36.
Kim Ki-young's continued fascination with B-movie exploitation themes as well as the increasingly obsessive and subversive nature of his films resulted in his isolation from the film community, and in financial failures at the box-office.
37.
When Kim Ki-young's career was highlighted at the second Pusan International Film Festival in 1997, his work found enthusiastic new audiences in the international film community.
38.
Kim Ki-young's death did not stop the revival of interest in his films.