In 2018, Chang-dong Lee’s film Burning was the first Korean film to be shortlisted for the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. South Korea already had a lot going for it even before the film Parasite won the Oscar this year.
Earlier, when I had watched Lee’s films – like Secret Sunshine (2007), Poetry (2010), and Burning (2018) – I immediately fell in love with his dreamy, minimalist style of filmmaking. It was beautiful to see how he could create a furious, intense drama with the most straightforward and most modest of plots. His films led me to one question: how and when did a tiny nation like South Korea develop such sophisticated filmmaking traditions?
But I knew that was merely a rhetorical question – the size of a country has nothing to do with its filmmaking traditions.
One country that comes to mind, for its stunning range of films, is Iran. It is home to some of the world’s greatest directors who have created some of the most well-known classics. Iranian directors, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Majid Majidi, Ashgar Farhadi, Darius Mehrjui have employed powerful narrative techniques, to produce memorable films that set high standards in filmmaking,
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