The Close-up

This week we’re excited to present a conversation which recently took place as part of our new series, Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s, following a screening of Yu Hyun-mok’s 1961 South Korean classic, Aimless Bullet. Film critic, lecturer, and author Darcy Paquet and series co-curators, Korean Film Archive's Young Jin Eric Choi and Subway Cinema's Goran Topalovic, lead a discussion of the film. Banned in 1961 for its scathing critique of postwar reconstruction but now widely hailed as one of the greatest Korean films ever made, Yu Hyun-mok’s breakout feature was this unrelentingly bleak, noir-tinged melodrama set in the aftermath of the Korean War. The film follows the tragic bond between two brothers living with their surviving family in a Seoul slum called Liberation Village. While Cheol-ho, an accountant suffering from a toothache he can’t afford to treat, struggles to scrape together a meager existence, the senseless consequences of the war gradually tear at the seams of his family and push his