Biography
He was born in Seoul in 1922 (although in many official documents 1919 appears as the year of birth). His father teaches English. After having shown, in the course of his studies, great predisposition in various artistic disciplines, such as writing, music and painting, he turned to medical studies, constantly maintaining an interest in cinema, which he consumed in industrial quantities and according to an omnivorous tension during a stay in Japan. When he returned to Korea in 1946, he devoted himself to medicine, ready to become a dentist, but also to theatrical staging at the University, where he directed the works of Chekhov and Shakespeare.
During the Second World War, he participated in the making of current affairs documentaries as part of the US Army Information Service: material that he used to make, in 1955, his first film, The Box of Death. After this debut, he will shoot another thirty-two films, until 1995. His first expression of artistic maturity is The Housemaid (1960), which contributed to the construction of the figure and narrative character of the "femme fatale", and which is universally considered as one of the most important films of Korean cinema of all time. After a period of great fortune, during the golden age of the 60s, the following decade constitutes one of the lowest points of Korean cinema, due to government censorship and a decrease in audiences. Kim Ki-young nevertheless manages, working completely independently, to give life to some of his most interesting and eccentric works: films such as The Insect Woman (1972) and Ieodo (1977), develop a strong influence on the younger generations of South Korean directors and producers. Kim Ki-young's popularity saw a sharp decline in the 1980s, but neglected by mainstream attention for much of the 1990s, he progressively became a cult figure for domestic critics and cinephiles.
In 1997 the Busan Festival dedicated the first major "historical" retrospective of his career to him: Kim's films, until then little known even in Korea, and almost completely unknown in the rest of the world, became the object of attention and enthusiastic study in Japan, the United States, Germany and France. When he and his wife were killed by a fire in their home, Kim was preparing a new work that was supposed to constitute his return as an "author" in contemporary production. The Berlin Film Festival dedicated a retrospective to his work in 1998, while the French Cinémathèque selected eighteen of his films, some recently rediscovered and restored, for a major retrospective in 2006.
