NEW DELHI: Critically-acclaimed Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-Woon, whose action thriller ‘The Age of Shadows’ is the Closing Film for the International Film Festival of India, said it would “surely be great” to incorporate elements of cinema from both countries into each other’s films.
Addressing the media in Panaji, he said he would like to mix the elements of Indian cinema like humour and other real life emotions into Korean films, he added.
Kim said he has been greatly inspired by the stalwarts of Indian cinema like Satyajit Ray and his films like Pather Panchali and Aparajita among others. They have had a major impression on his style of film making. He would like to collaborate with the Indian film industry to make films on history and the Independence struggle in both the countries, he added.
Jee-woon, who led successful films like “I Saw the Devil”, “The Last Stand” and “The Good, the Bad, the Weird”, was highly impressed with the Tamil superstar Rajinikanth’s “Robot” and would love to make a film like that some mix of historical drama.
Lead actor Song Kang-Ho said he is honoured that their film – which is also the South Korean entry in the Oscars – has been selected as the Closing Film at the IFFI 2016 and he is hopeful that the times to come would see more critically acclaimed films from both India and Korea being screened for the people in both the countries.
Set in Seoul and Shanghai, during the Japanese occupation in the late 1920s, the film depicts an intense drama that unfolds between a group of resistance fighters trying to bring in explosives from Shanghai to destroy key Japanese facilities in Seoul, on one side, and Japanese agents trying to stop them, on the other. A talented Korean-born Japanese police officer, who was previously in the independence movement himself, is thrown into a dilemma between the demands of his reality and the instinct to support a greater cause.
Kim said his film is not an attempt to show action and violence on the screen but to depict intense emotions associated with the Korean Independence struggle against the Japanese occupation. He informed that he has tried his best to show these emotions through special sound effects and the ability of his actors to emote them on the screen.
