Chlotrudis members were saddened to hear about the passing of South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk due to COVID-19 related causes while working on his next film project in Latvia. Kim made a splash in the early 2000’s with THE ISLE, a quiet, pensive reflection on two unhappy people who connect via horrific acts of self-mutilation. Despite some startling beauty, it wasn’t an easy film to watch, nor to understand, but his follow-up, 2004’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER AND… SPRING, was beloved by many Chlotrudis members, showing up on six members’ top year-end lists, winning to Chlotrudis Awards, Best Cinematography for Dong-hyeong Baek, and sharing the Best Movie Award with Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy. This film had staying power as well, ranking #71 in Chlotrudis’ Top 100 films of the first decade of the 21st century and #64 of Chlotrudis’ 101 Favorite Foreign Language Films. In 2005 he continued to captivate the society with haunting 3-IRON, which earned Kim Trudy nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director. He had one more film that was fairly widely embraced by the society in 2007 called TIME, before his films got harder to see with either scant, or no distribution in the U.S. Not that we didn’t try. DREAM (2009), POONSANG (2011), and PIETA (2013) all got good reviews from Chlotrudis members; they just didn’t have much of an impact on the rest of American audiences, and his films from the past few years haven’t registered here at all.
Kim Ki-Duk had some personal issues going on in the last several years as well, but he was a very talented filmmaker whose work will be missed. He leaves behind a nice legacy of work that film buffs can always revisit, and ushered in a strong age of South Korean filmmaking that included the likes of filmmakers Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Hong Sangsoo, Lee chang-dong and many, many more.