Success of K-pop in Europe

 

RESOURCE YONHAP NEWS AGENCY

Members of the 5 K-pop Bands (picture from yonhap news)

The international impact of Korean popular culture is getting unable to obviate. Last weekend Paris, the capital of France, was full of thousand of fans waiting to taste “kimchi flavour”. The Parisian city held last Friday, 10^th of June, the biggest korean pop concert celebrated in Europe, (I guess the first one). It was a huge success for the 5 top Korean bands (TVXQ, Girls’ Generation, Super Junior, SHINee and f(x)) in their European debut.

Thus was the impact of the performance that it was held another one on Saturday, selling all the tickets. Over 7,000 fans from all over Europe could enjoy 44 songs of these Korean groups in Le Zenith de Paris concert hall. Two percent of the audience was Koreans.

The Saturday, 11^th of June, Lee Soo-man, founder and chairman of SM Entertainment, one of the most important agencies in Korea, gave a conference with around 70 composers and producers in which he talked about the success of K-pop culture.

As Lee Soo-man explained the “Korean wave or Hallyu” is spreading beyond Korean borders in 3 stages: exporting hallyu products, collaborating with foreign firms and passing down Korean CT to local people to create a localized hallyu.

In general, nowadays the spreading of Korean pop culture outside of Korea is moving forward really fast, in a way we cannot even notice. Teddy Ridley, American record producer that worked with Michael Jackson, described K-pop as a type of “movement”. It is becoming a cultural movement implicating the whole world and It cannot be obviated the importance that it has over the international relations of the country.

Mother

 

Poster of the film "Mother" (dir. Bong Joon-ho)

“Mother” is the 5^th film of Bong Joon-ho, respectful korean director that starts his career with the film “Barking dogs never bite” but he wouldn’t become acknowledge till his next movie “Memories of murder”, that is based on the true story of the 1^st  known serial killer in the country. This film was exposed in several film festivals around the world including Cannes, London International Film Festival, Tokyo International Film Festival or San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain getting awards in, both, Spain and Tokyo, as well as, in Torino Film Festival.

Mother tells the story of a woman that has to struggle to save her own son from murder accusation. The main topic of the film revolves around the idea of a mother that is able to face any kind of situation in order to protect her children, no matter what it is, if it is immoral or so.

Probably, one of the most interesting features of the film is the acting of the main roles. Both characters, the mother (Kim Hye-ja) and the son (Won Bin) have a very dramatic weight inside the story. Kim Hye-ja plays the role of an unnamed widow that works selling medicinal herbs and practicing acupuncture, and lives with her son, Do-joon, who is mentally disabled. One day, Do-joon is arrested under murder suspicion when a high school girl is discovered dead.

From this moment, Do-joon’s mother, trusting in her son’s innocence, starts to search and investigate the girl, her background and every detail of the murder in order to prove the innocence of Do-joon. This investigation would lead her toward an old man that collects junk and this man turns to be the witness supporting that Do-joon is the culprit. In the view of the circumstances, the woman ends up killing the old man burning also the junkyard but leaving behind her acupuncture equipment. 

 

Another charm of the film is Bong Joon-ho’s ability to keep a tension feeling over the whole movie. Bong Joon-ho manages again to capture the attention of the public through a very carefully thought-out use of the image. Its photography is very intimist, based on backlighting and dark image that confers to the film a texture and a sublime beauty helping to the atmosphere. About the treatment of the image, it is important to mention the cyclic composition of the film where the beginning and the ending have some aspects in common (the mother dancing both in the field and the bus). 

Beginning of the film with Do-joon's mother dancing

As a constant in Bong Joon-ho’s films, Mother is created also as a mix of genre. However, this mix genre won’t shock the audience as much as other of his films because the merger is more natural, thriller as well as intimist film marked with a comic overtone in some situations.

With this film, Joon-ho reintroduces the depiction of the police from a negative point of view, as he did in “Memories of Murder”, almost blaming them of corruption, taking confessions from torturing the suspect.

This is a film with a great emotional weight that gives the audience the opportunity to get into the story showing a diseased portrait of the characters and analysing the morality of their actions.