The Jury Award for Best Feature Film at the 2005 Philadelphia Film Festival wasawarded to a South Korean film The Road directed by Pae Chang-ho. Hong Sang-soo's the Tale of Cinema was invited to compete in the 2005 Cannes Film Festival where Park Chan-wook's Old Boy won the Grand Prix a year ago. To date, the remake rights for over ten Korean films have been soldto US film companies. As this short list shows, Korean films have not only beengaining wide popularity amongst the general audience in Korea and its neighboring countries in Asia, but have also received critical acclaim from critics and scholars, in particular through international film festival circuits. Korean cinema, in fact, is experiencing a "renaissance" in the 21st century. We will take the recent surge of success behind Korean cinema as a wayto explore our object of study: Korea and the cinema. We will situate Korean cinema in broader (and at times narrow) cultural, social, and aesthetic contexts to investigate transnational media production and circulation, globalization, consumer culture, commercialization, Hollywoodization, and construction of national, ethnic, gender identities, etc. The course will focuson the works of prominent filmmakers of Korea's past and present, such as Shin Sang-ok, Im Kwon-taek, Kim Ki-duk, and Lee Chang-dong, as well as paying special attention to genres of Korean film such as the melodrama, slapstick comedy, and erotica. No prerequisites. All films with English subtitles.