East Asian Cinema in Cologne

A small but eclectic audience gathered on a cold rainy night at the recent Short Cuts festival in Cologne to find out what South Korea had to offer in terms of film.

But why South Korea?

Sarah Möcke from Cologne's Filmhaus explained: "We decided to show South Korean films because the international interest in film has increased in the past few years. The South Korean film industry is very active at the moment. So we decided to show some of their films here."

Exciting new talent

Young South Korean film-makers have built up a reputation as talented and innovative artists, who combine the traditional and modern aspects of South Korean culture to create exciting cinema.

The festival team chose eight short films to present contemporary South Korean cinema to a German audience.

From Zho Min-Sug's "Mono Love Song" about a deaf and dumb girl who falls in love with an almost blind boy to Ku Bon-hwan's "Sunshower" reminiscing about childhood, the films are explorations of individual lives.

"Pig and Shakespeare" by Kim Geon takes this notion to the limit -- a young farmer boy is wrenched from his everyday mundane existence when he sees two students enacting a scene from Hamlet in a field.

Fascinated, he observes them from a distance. They invite him to take part. Later, he has the courage to defy his authoritarian father.

Personal not political

None of the films touch on the relationship with North Korea or on South Korean politics. Instead, looking at life in the province, they reflect a people which is examining itself, its inner feelings.

In this sense, South Korean cinema seems comparable to Chinese cinema, despite very different political regimes.

"Chinese movies are more into a personal kind of life, not political," explained Mongolian-born Odongoo Shiiter, an Asian cinema expert and member of the international jury for the Short Cuts festival.

"In recent years, Chinese film-makers have been trying to show up life in other cities. The big Chinese cities are very developed but in a lot of other cities, people lead quite a hard life, so a lot of directors are trying to bring this up in their films and show them to the public," Shiiter added.

Chinese poetic cinema

Shiiter presented several contemporary Chinese productions at Cologne's Chinese Film and Cultural Festival, which celebrated twenty years since the German city has been twinned with Chinese capital Beijing.

"The Red Jacket" about loneliness in a remote mountain village, "The Black and White Milk Cow" about a student who is forced by circumstances to give up his studies and become a teacher in his home village or "The Wheat Guest" about the wheat cutting season are all poetic cinematic representations of the challenges posed by daily life in China.

The international festival circuit is an important platform for Asian cinema and the growing audience numbers are a sign that the European film-going public is hungry for more.