South Korea's movie boom

Take Care Of My Cat has had a worldwide release

The South Korean film industry is on a massive high after a string of hits.

South Korean films such as Nowhere To Hide, Take Care Of My Cat, and Untold Scandal have been huge successes domestically, and have earned releases around the world.

"Three years ago we had one blockbuster hit, called Shiri, which broke Titanic's record," South Korean director Jonathan Kim told BBC World Service's The Ticket programme.

"That actually gave audiences the confidence and belief in Korean films - that it could be a good movie and also the quality could be comparable to Hollywood films, although with much less money."

Censorship lifting

The success was down to a number of factors, Kim said.

A mandatory quota insists that for a third of the year, Korean cinema can only show Korean films.

And Kim said that as more revenue came in, so better films could be made - but with the emphasis firmly on quality.

Miramax are planning a remake of My Wife Is A Gangster

That in turn had encouraged ever more people to the cinema, he said.

"We were spending a little bit money on the budgets and the quality was getting better, so we were able to make better films," Kim explained.

"Also, we were under very strict censorship. Around 1995-96, a court had ruled that censorship was illegal, so we were able to make a different genre of films."

Kim said that films had become extremely diverse since this ruling.

Again, this had greatly increased the appeal of South Korea's "local product."

"Matrix 2 or Terminator 3 were not as successful as some of the little films that we made at the time in Korea," he said.

He said that this preference for home-made films over Hollywood was down to the creative process behind Korean film.

"Anybody can make big films if they had money," Kim argued.

"But creativity I don't think you can buy."

Dark chapter

Particularly popular among South Koreans are gangster films - and amusing parodies of the genre.

One of the biggest successes has been My Wife Is A Gangster, in which a man marries an innocent-seeming girl, only to find she is in fact a Mafia boss.

Home-grown films kept Terminator 3 off the top spot

Film company Miramax have already bought the rights for a US remake for a considerable sum.

The process works the other way, too - A remake of Dangerous Liaisons, entitled Scandal, is currently topping the Korean box office.

The relaxation of censorship has also allowed Kim to make his own recent film, Shumi Island - the true story of 31 commandos trained to go into North Korea in 1971 to assassinate the North Korean leader.

The mission was cancelled - but the story of what then happened was kept quiet for two decades, Kim said.

"These people were staying on the same island for three years, training for no purpose.

"Finally they break out, and try to talk to the South Korean president... They get stopped and they all blow themselves up with grenades.

"This was a big secret for 20 years.

"It actually surfaced in the early 90s, and I thought talking about our old history and what government did wrong would be a great sensation."