Director Yoon Jong-bin has shot five feature films to date since making his debut in 2005 with the award-winning The Unforgiven. In that time he has risen to become one of the most influential directors working in the Korean film industry today. It may seem strange to say this of someone who has twice been invited to Cannes, but his central role in contemporary Korean cinema has yet to be fully recognized internationally. This special focus, “Power and Secrets: The Cinematic World of Yoon Jong-bin,” aims to give viewers an opportunity to delve more deeply into the work of this singular filmmaker.
For most directors with a similar level of experience, the term “cinematic world” might feel a bit grandiose. After all, how much of a world can one depict in just five films? But in Yoon’s case, the description fits. There is something expansive about his works; they may be set within a particular time and place, focusing on a particular group of characters, but the stories he tells open our eyes to something much wider.
Take as an example Yoon’s debut film The Unforgiven, a low-budget 35mm feature shot to satisfy the director’s graduation requirements for Chung-Ang University’s film department. The film looks at the experiences of two young men in the course of their mandatory two-year military service. Featuring the future star Ha Jung-woo in his first leading role, The Unforgiven shows how these two friends, reunited by chance in the military, gradually become estranged because of the new roles and pressures placed on them. But the film does more than simply portray their individual experiences. It also reveals in detail the power structures and systems of influence in the military, and how those who don’t adapt themselves to the system become susceptible to violence.
At its premiere in the Busan International Film Festival, critics praised the work not only for its dramatic strengths, but for its serving as a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding various aspects of Korean masculinity. The FIPRESCI jury, which awarded the film its top prize, wrote “Yoon’s independent film offers a fresh insight into the Korean national character with its harrowing depiction of the psychological violence done to young Korean men during their obligatory military service.
Shot in an intimate, naturalistic style, The Unforgiven suggests that the pent-up violence that explodes in such highly stylized popular entertainments as A Bittersweet Life and Oldboy may have its roots in the brutality inflicted by military discipline and an authoritarian social structure – elements which may have passed from Korean society as a whole, but which linger on in the life of the barracks.” And sure enough the NETPAC jury, which also awarded the film, praised “its critical reflection on ‘masculinity’, not only in South Korea or the military, but in contemporary society in general.”
With his second feature, Yoon turned his attention to Seoul’s upscale nightlife district Cheongdam-dong. Beastie Boys (sometimes referred to as The Moonlight of Seoul) focuses on two men working as hosts in exclusive private clubs. In this industry, men are paid to entertain and drink with high-paying female clients. Ha Jung-woo and Yoon Kye-sang play characters who become caught up in this ruthless economy, in which intimacy can seemingly be bought and sold. Inevitably, in such an environment money starts to get in the way of any sort of relationship.
Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time was Yoon’s commercial breakthrough, with 4.7 million admissions at the Korean box office. Choi Min-sik (Oldboy) plays a customs officer in Busan who comes across a stash of methamphetamine, which becomes the starting point for his rise in the criminal world. Within the gangster movie genre, we are familiar with stories about characters who chart a dramatic rise and fall within an organization due to their ruthlessness and risk taking. But this is not that kind of story. Instead, Choi’s protagonist succeeds through a combination of shamelessness and a persistent mining of family and clan connections. Although set within the 1980s and 1990s, the film exposes the deep-seated tendency within Korean society to leverage family, regional and school connections for personal gain.
Kundo: Age of the Rampant in some ways seems to stand out among Yoon’s filmography. Set in the mid-19th century during the Joseon Dynasty, it focuses on a low-ranking butcher (Ha Jung-woo) who is driven by personal tragedy to join the Kundo, a group of bandits who target the aristocracy and share their wealth with the common people. Yoon says he deliberately avoided depicting the protagonist in a heroic manner. “It is not the special or talented people, but very ordinary people who can change the world, especially when gathered en masse,” he said at the film’s press conference in 2014. Shot on a large budget, the film offers spectacle and mainstream entertainment at the same time as it explores issues related to wealth and inequality.
Yoon’s most recent work The Spy Gone North screened in the Midnight Section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Based on a jaw-dropping true story from the 1990s, the film details the experiences of an intelligence agent who takes on an undercover assignment as a businessman attempting to do business with North Korea. His real objective is to find out more about North Korea’s secretive nuclear program. As it moves back and forth between Seoul, China and North Korea, the film pushes deeper and deeper into the real nature of relations between North and South Korea, and politicians’ willingness to exploit conditions for their own ends. In recent years, there have been many South Korean films that have delved into relations between the two Koreas, but none have done so with as much complexity and insight as The Spy Gone North.
Taken as a whole, Yoon’s films provide a multifaceted look at various aspects of contemporary and historical Korean society. His ability to entertain the audience at the same time as he digs deep to reveal the inner dynamics of various social and political issues gives his films an added depth. As his career has progressed, he has also become active as a producer, working behind the scenes to realize the box office hits A Violent Prosecutor (2016), Money (2019) and The Closet (2020). In that sense, he is a director who can’t be ignored by anyone who takes a serious interest in contemporary Korean cinema.