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When no one in Hollywood even dreamed that a Korean film could one day beat all American productions at the Oscar - a young Korean director traveled with his films to the major festivals in Europe and won a series of awards.
Since the turn of the century, Kim Ki-duk's films have given the world an insight into this country colonized by the Japanese, destroyed by a proxy war between world powers and traumatized by several military dictatorships.
A tough society was seen with baseball bats as a weapon of choice.
At the same time, all of his films were parables;
they spoke of fatalism and remnants of Confucian belief.
Kim was the first international messenger of the Korean cinema that has now achieved world fame.
At home he always remained an outsider, a bad guy, as one of his films was called, and was accused of sexual harassment two years ago.
The courts acquitted him, but he no longer seemed comfortable in his home country.
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On Friday, Kim succumbed to a Covid-19 infection at the age of 59 in Riga, Latvia, where he apparently wanted to buy a house.
A memory in four fantastic films.
Seom - The Island (2000)
Language of Cruelty: Suh Jung in "Seom"
Source: picture-alliance / obs
A remote lake.
At its edge is a hut from which a quiet young woman supplies fishing tourists with gear.
She falls in love with someone who is on the run because he killed his girlfriend out of jealousy.
That can never go well with Kim Ki-duk.
Two violent deaths and two suicide attempts later something like love emerges, but then the outside world also emerges, which was previously not part of the experimental set-up.
The two behave like people in their original state, but the only way they can talk to each other is the language of cruelty.
The scenes with the fishhooks at the Venice Film Festival drove many viewers out of the cinema.
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring (2003).
A film about the cycles of life, a Bildungsroman on a raft hermitage in a quiet lake in the middle of wooded heights.
The seasons change.
There is a master and a disciple, and it is about selfishness and desire and the dangers that arise from them, it is about the opposition of body and mind and that of spiritual and worldly rules.
In an unforgettable scene, two city police officers come to the raft to arrest the boy as a murderer, but the master decides that his apprentice must first perform his duties.
During the waiting time, the policemen color in characters.
If you want to bring your soul into balance, you can't watch a wiser film, and for once Kim holds back with excesses of violence.
The cruelty is there anyway, only this time it hits animals.
But, as Kim once said: "We ate the fish and frogs afterwards."
Bin-Jip - Empty Houses (2004).
Scene from Bin-Jip with Hee Jae, Seung-yeon Lee and Hyuk ho Kwon
Credit: picture alliance / Everett Collection
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Among the many unforgettable films by Kim Ki-duk, a particularly unique one.
He takes the age-old boy-meets-girl story and reinvents it in a way that rivals Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Only Kim is much less gossiped than the Elizabethan Englishman.
The boy is silent, and the girl is not afraid of silence either.
In addition, he gradually becomes invisible, so that a ménage à trois with the girl's evil husband seems conceivable.
In spite of these idiosyncrasies, and that is Kim's gigantic achievement, it doesn't look like it was designed on the drawing board, but lively, natural, poetic.
Despite the occasional violence and a great melancholy that lies above everything, it is perhaps the most cheerful film in the Korean's portfolio.
Pietà (2012)
In the shadow theater of ideas: Cho Min-soo in "Pietà"
Source: picture alliance / dpa
In all honesty, I would have to watch the movie again to get the details of the plot straight.
Or read a summary.
There is no time for the first and the second is reluctant to me.
Because Kim Ki-duk is like warming up the food of a star chef in the microwave.
He belongs, in his own unusual way, to the tribe of the Lynchs, von Triers, Bergmans, Derens, Buñuels, Fellinis.
Kim shares her penchant for the surreal, the metaphysical.
This is where the real action takes place.
What happens in the world of the body that we see immediately is just the shadow theater for the ideas and moods behind it.
This is what all of his productions aim at, regardless of losses or taboos.
In Pietà, a bone-breaking money collector is caught incest with his own mother.
As I said, this is not a summary.
It should certainly not prevent you from looking at this masterpiece.