A tale of doomed romance and palace power games, Eunuch follows two forlorn lovers who end up in the service of the king: one after being forced to become a eunuch, and the other after being sent away by her father to the royal harem. Set in the Joseon Dynasty era, with beautiful cinematography and production design, Eunuch stands out among Shin Sang-ok’s costume dramas as an especially lush widescreen technicolor entertainment that takes a step into exploitation cinema with…

Heo-wook and Ji-youn are a young couple, desperately poor, who can meet only on Sundays. Without any money to go to a cafe, they wander the windswept streets and parks of Seoul. Their future is bleak and their relationship appears strained. And they face a crisis: Ji-youn is pregnant. Unable to support a child, she tells Heo-wook that she wants an abortion. Forgotten in storage for 37 years after censors refused to allow its release, A Day Off was belatedly…

Before he started working for the Shaw Brothers Studio and kicked off the martial arts movie craze in the West with The King Boxer, Chung Chang-wha built the foundations for action and genre filmmaking in South Korea. Set during the Joseon Dynasty period, A Swordsman in the Twilight introduces us to a lone bamboo-hat-wearing swordsman (Nam Koong-won) who appears in a lawless village. And while what follows may be a standard revenge story, Chung employs long shots to film action…

Burning Mountain is set in a southwestern rural village during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Partisan soldiers fighting on the side of North Korea are hiding out in the mountains. Meanwhile, the village is filled with widows and single women, having lost the entire male population to war or forced conscription. One day, a deserter from the North Korean People’s Army begins hiding out in a nearby bamboo forest. A widow, Jeom-rye (whose husband fought for the South),…