THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS Seoul After Dark: Personal Memories of Korean Cinema

The Museum of Modern Art announces a film series, Seoul After Dark: Personal Memories of Korean Cinema. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Korean Film Archive (KOFA), this program offers a range of curatorial voices, bringing together personal selections from some of Korea’s most internationally celebrated filmmakers alongside restored classics from KOFA. Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, and Hwang Dong-hyuk have each chosen films that illuminate their own artistic formation, creating an intimate portrait of influence and inspiration across generations.

The program traces a particular lineage within Korean cinema: the persistent examination of social fracture through the aesthetics of crime and noir. From Lee Man-hee’s psychologically corrosive Black Hair through the baroque revenge narratives of the 2000s, these films demonstrate how Korean directors have employed genre frameworks to pose questions of class mobility, economic precarity, and institutional failure. The noir tradition in Korean cinema emerges not as a stylistic imitation of Hollywood but as a local response to specific historical pressures: the compressed industrialization of the postwar decades, the social tensions of the authoritarian period, and the dislocations of rapid economic transformation.

Alongside contemporary works—including Park Chan-wook’s rarely screened Thirst and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s historical epic The Fortress—the program showcases archival restorations spanning from 1958 to 1999. A selection of early short films by Bong Joon-ho and his contemporaries also offers insight into the formative experiments of Korea’s “new wave” generation.