Category: SF

Old Movie Promo Posters in Korea

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This entry is part 66 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

In Korean cinemas, upcoming and currently-running films are advertised using handouts (available on a stand within the cinema) that are A4 printouts of the film’s poster on the front, with a writeup and some still frames from the film on the back. Maybe these exist in Canada now too, but I’d never seen such a thing before I arrived here, years ago.  As long as I’ve been here, these flyers were always just a re-texted version of the film poster, with the title in Hangeul. (Sometimes, the title really is just “in Hangeul”—not translated, just written using English words in …

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The Music of Jo Hyeja: Now on DVD!

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I couldn’t be prouder of my wife, whose first short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is now available on DVD, as part of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Classics Vol. 1 Short Film Collection. Well, technically it’s been out a little while, but a week or so ago, I think it was, she received her contributor copies of the DVD. How spectacular: images from all the films adorn the cover, but hers take a prominent place. What’s more exciting to me is: this is South Korea’s first Lovecraftian adaptation to the screen, and it did really well in that capacity. …

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Korean SF Translations, and Our Current Workflow

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So, my wife and I have been working on a couple of translations lately.  I mentioned, back in September, having finished up one of them. We just put the almost-final touches on the second one. (We sent off three questions to the original author of the second one we finished drafting, but otherwise, the translation’s pretty much done and just needs some proofreading before it’s sent off.) The two stories are: 레디메이드 보살 by Sunghwan Park (English title: “The Prefab Bodhisattva.” This is a story I’ve mentioned here before, as one of the tales adapted to the screen in The Doomsday Book omnibus …

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Daerijeon: The Proxy War—Online Now!

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Well, folks, it took two and a half years—actually, almost three—but finally, Mrs. Jiwaku’s short film adaptation of the famous Korean SF writer/film-critic Djuna‘s novella (so-so translation here), “Daerijeon: The Proxy War” is online. You can see it over at Youtube, though I’ll embed it here for your convenience: Note, that’s set to autoload the English subtitles by Youtube’s caption function. You might want to resize the captions so they look good (and they look best in fullscreen mode). If you do enjoy it, please share it! That’s pretty much the biggest encouragement you can give her as a film director, and it will help ensure …

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The Cosplayers of the Late Ming Dynasty

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Wait… cosplay? In the late Ming Dynasty? Apparently, yes. And I don’t just mean dressing up in costumes, which is a universal and ancient activity. I mean cosplay. What’s the difference? I’ll let Jonathan Spence lay out the dots, before I connect them. Here’s a passage from Return to Dragon Mountain: After his dismissal by the prince of Lu, [Zhang Dai’s] father returned to Shaoxing in early 1632 just before the region was smitten with a prolonged drought, which badly damaged crops and led to the threat of famine. For both father and son the ordinary fabric of life was starting to unravel. Zhang Dai, …

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