This article grows out of a conversation with Aditya, a writer, reader and longtime cinephile, who has an attentive and curious relationship with art. We spoke about Korean cinema abroad, but also about labels, discomfort and what it feels like when stories make movement in a broader sense. What follows is somewhere between an interview and a shared attempt to sit with those questions.
Aditya’s coming of age on the internet was in the mid to late 2000s, a time when being online still felt expansive rather than overwhelming. For his generation, the internet was not something you were born fluent in. It felt closer to a repository of all human knowledge and art, and torrents were simply the gateway to it. Watching films illegally was less out of rebellion and more because it was almost often the only way to access anything foreign at all, let alone festival cinema or work outside the mainstream.
Hollywood came first, but it was far from gentle. The gateway was violent, off-mainstream cinema, the kind that made its rounds among seventeen and eighteen year olds with films like Fight Club as a rite of passage. Then one went down the rabbit hole. Tarantino led to Charlie Kaufman, Kaufman to Richard Linklater, and Linklater to Wes Anderson. Aditya recalls that after watching any of them, he would repeat a kind of similar routine. Read through Roger Ebert first, Wikipedia next; tracing backwards through its director, influences and the wider moment.
Ebert, he says, taught him how to watch cinema. How a film sits inside sociocultural context, identifies a director’s signature, and also how to sometimes let a film take over. Parallelly, Wikipedia became a map and a way to place what he was watching into history. That habit stayed with him, even as the films changed. It took him first to the 70s American cinema, then further to European films from the 1950s and 60s, and on to Japanese filmmakers. Somewhere along the way, it led him back to Indian cinema, especially the work of Satyajit Ray.Finally South and East Asian cinema followed.
Aditya remembers watching Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son in a sweltering, fully packed old Chennai theatre, as “One of the most sublime moments of my life as a film lover.”
Closer to home, Indian cinema was also shifting. Ram Gopal Varma was breaking ground while still working familiar frameworks. Anurag Kashyap’s films, presence at global festivals and writing made it feel like Indian cinema was finally in conversation with the world. His blog, Passion for Cinema was something Aditya remembers returning to often. Moifightclub and Jai Arjun Singh’s Jabberwock, would also be places he would point someone to, if they wanted to understand how people were learning to watch cinema during that period.
While this sets context into Aditya’s gradual descent into cinema and films, he talks about his discovery of Korean Cinema. One fine afternoon, during a particularly dull physics lecture, a classmate narrates the story of Zinda, a Bollywood remake of “Oldboy“. He remembers being riveted by the plot alone. When he finally watched the film, Aditya says he felt something similar to what Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said of Kafka, on reading The Metamorphosis for the first time, – “I didn’t know you were allowed to write like that.”
Aditya didn’t begin looking for Korean cinema. They continued to find him through conversations, chance encounters and recommendations leading him on. Park Chan-wook led to Kim Ki-duk and then Bong Joon-ho. Films like Memories of Murder sat with other procedurals he loved. Even now, he mentions Tony Zhou’s video essay on the way scenes are blocked in that film, drawn to how carefully space and movement were controlled. As striking as Park and Bong were, Kim Ki-duk felt different. There was a range there, from the long stretches of quiet in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring to the psychological horror of Crocodile.
When he thinks about the first Korean film he watched, Aditya doesn’t hesitate to mention Oldbody!
“It felt new in every way,” he says. “At a plot level, in how brave it was, in the staging of the fight scenes, in those jarring, unexpected transitions.”
He vividly describes the music and the counterintuitive choices of using classical themes.
“Who can forget that first shot,” he says, “the fist clenched around the rope while Look Who’s Talking plays? Or the jazz and classical theme over the hallway fight scene?”
He says that while watching it for the first time, he knew he was in the presence of genius and that appreciation and gratitude only grew with time for him.
Today, it’s difficult to talk about films without immediately placing them somewhere, by country, by movement, or by moment. “Korean cinema,” “South East Asian films” and categories that feel obvious today, are habits that are newer than we think. There was a time when watching something didn’t come with a label attached.
Aditya doesn’t think much about labels. He describes his instincts as cosmopolitan, and for him, films have rarely needed categories to justify their appeal. Watching foreign cinema, listening to global music and reading literature in translation, he says, isn’t just our minds expanding in an aesthetic sense. It feels necessary. He talks about it as a way of being in the world over it being a matter of taste. As dependency on communication and technologies have increased, he points out, we now live in what Marshall McLuhan once called a “global village”, with all the complexity that comes with it. In regard to that, consuming stories from elsewhere becomes a conscious act of learning how other people live, think and respond to their sociocultural, political, economic and civilisational environments or circumstances.
At some point, discovery becomes larger than yourself. What once felt like yours begins to make rounds, gets picked up by people far outside our premises. A song, book, film or story you had to search for or had discovered, suddenly shows up everywhere. It is trending, being referenced casually and claimed very loudly. And with that comes a strange, childish instinct to protect it. To measure how long you’ve known it, how deeply you’ve watched, whether someone else’s love for it is casual appreciation or rightful. But does that instinct really hold up? Who gets to decide what counts as enough knowledge, or real fandom or earned attachment. After circling on this for a while, Aditya and I did not seem to land on an answer as much as a shared recognition of how slippery the idea is. Pop culture cannot belong to the people who found it first or early. They move on, and when they do, the scale of the shift is bigger than yourself.
For Aditya, this broad audience is where things look different and he distinguishes the line between art and entertainment. One person’s high art is another person’s commodified sellout, and the deeper you look at the divide, the harder it becomes to define clearly. In the 2000s, Korean cinema felt very demanding. Those films were original, provocative, questioning and complicated. And those same qualities, he admits, also made them less accessible.
He laughs about the kind of masochism of willingly sitting through something disturbing, boring, or even incomprehensible, and then not being able to let it go.That lingering discomfort was half the point. And in contrast, the newer, more popular shows he’s only half-watched don’t offer the same kind of engagement.
When asked about how he feels about Korean films becoming more widely known, and how he felt about the shift, he mentions how the visibility did not seem to arrive all at once. He remembers reading that Kim Ki-duk had received something close to rockstar treatment in Kerala, of all places, a reminder that there were places Korean Cinema had already found its roots, even in the 2000s.
What he noticed more clearly was a second wave, sometime around 2017 or 2018, when his then teenage cousin spoke very actively about K-Pop and Dramas within her social circles. When she told him this wasn’t unusual, that it reflected a much larger group her age, it became clear that something widespread was happening. By 2022, or post covid to categorise, they were no longer a niche and Korean Culture seemed to be at its peak. Women across age groups were watching Korean soaps and what struck him was how far the content had traveled linguistically. Telugu streaming platforms (his native language) like Aha, were dubbing dramas like Descendants of the Sun, signalling a reach beyond urban, English-speaking audiences and into more vernacular spaces.
It’s a different world now, and that difference is palpable. He acknowledges that someone coming across Korean cinema for the first time today is unlikely to go through the range of emotions he did. Violence, provocation, even gore have become much more familiar and absorbed into streaming platforms. What once felt transgressive, now often feels expected. But he draws a line there, that familiarity doesn’t mean understanding because most times, it is surface level. And, that if a viewer chooses to look deeply into them, and really engage rather than skim, they will still find the effect alive. There are many films communicating a worldview that is morally complicated with rocky explanations. They ask uncomfortable questions, look at ordinary behaviours under pressure and explore the difficulty of fitting life into procedural systems of knowledge. The questions asked don’t expire because audiences have seen more, they become all the more interesting and important.
Looking back, I realise there is no neat way to close this kind of conversation. Every answer seems to open up another corridor, another film and other questions about how stories, art and film, journey. Korean cinema, much like other cultural exports, did not arrive with a fixed timeline or stop with certain milestones. It went on to find new audiences and provoke more conversation. With Aditya, with friends, with myself. There’s always going to be another piece of art waiting to complicate what you thought you understood. And Maybe, that is the whole point.
Written by – Samhitha Avvari
About the author –
Samhitha is an avid hobbyist, exploring writing, photography and personal blogging through intention and curiosity. She hopes to build a personal archive that reflects her journey, and the way she sees the world. She believes in romanticising the ordinary, maximising life with every experience, in a world that often feels fast. Her creative practice is rooted in capturing casual magic; like the light on a street corner, ducks in the park, a sentence worth remembering. Samhitha is fascinated by the interplay between language shaping identity, connection, and expression, with a particular interest in Korean language and society.