Paul Ajosshi

Busan Bound

Thank you for sharing! Been bugging everyone I know about something like this… do you have any other suggests for how to see older Korean films with subtitles? Or at all?

Finding older Korean films with English subtitles can be a chore, but in recent years the Korean Film Archive and others have been remastering and releasing DVD collections of classic films. Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid was available free online at mubi.com, but now seems to have disappeared from their collection (though is available on DVD thanks to KOFA). 

You can visit the KOFA library and watch Korean films there, you can head down to Hot Tracks and pay full whack for some fantastic new releases or you can spend your days at the Yongsan Electronics market in dusty old DVD stores hunting through piles of films that did not sell well on first release and have been stuck in the remainder bin. My favourite haunt used to be at the Tokkaebi market down at Cheongyecheon, crumbling old buildings with hidden video and DVD caverns filled with astonishing collections of Korean films. Thanks to the gentrification of the area those shops are long gone, but you sometimes see their smaller, poorer cousins in underground shopping streets dotted around Northern Seoul.

Films do pop up online occasionally (and can be found through various nefarious means), but there’s no guarantee they will hang about for long. 

One last bastion of hope is the Korea Foundation, their classic film season is almost over, but you can still catch a couple of movies in the next month. There may be other ways to get your classic Korean film fix, but hopefully this will be a good starting point.

Trying to watch British comedies with a Korean S.O. is the worst. I so badly want Busan to get the jokes. Truth be told, I’m not entirely convinced subtitles would fix it all.

It can be tough, but the subtitles can help a lot. Sometimes a simple half hour of television has turned into a long conversation and dissection of the jokes in an attempt to understand what is going on. After twelve years together we’ve learnt a lot about each other’s sense of humour and where that comes from, but it’s a constantly evolving relationship with many missteps and misunderstandings when it comes to comedy (both British and Korean).

One of the most joyous things was introducing my wife to Fawlty Towers and despite there being no subtitles and not everything being understood, the underlying comedy was so strong that she fell in love with it. Some things have struck a chord deep within my wife’s comedic soul, whereas other things have left her cold. Sharing our tastes with each other is a fascinating experience, a delicate dance of acceptance and refusal as we introduce each other to the things that make us tick, whilst trying to understand why some things work and others don’t.

And it makes me so happy when my wife laughs… so very happy.