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A Splendid Outing
(Hwaryeohan Oechool)

Screening on Film
Directed by Kim Su-Yong.
With Yoon Jeong-Hee, Lee Dae-Keun, Lee Young-Ha.
South Korea, 1978, 35mm, black & white, 90 min.
Korean with English subtitles.
Print source: Korean Film Archive

The deep affinities of veteran filmmaker Kim Su-Yong (b. 1929-) to the Young Sang Sidae movement are apparent in his sharply feminist and hallucinatory late Seventies fable of an overworked female executive haunted by strange dreams, one of which compels her to a remote fishing village where she is inexplicably kidnapped to a remote South Sea island and sold to a peasant farmer. The return of the primitive repressed, which recurs insistently throughout 1970s Korean cinema, takes on jarring new dimensions in A Splendid Outing, whose stark contrast between the archaic rural and the overdeveloped urban ambiguously signals the dangers of South Korea’s accelerated development and its blindness to the extreme stratifications reconfiguring the postwar nation. The role of the beleaguered executive is sensitively played by famed actress Yoon Jeong-Hee—best known in the US for her award-winning lead performance in Lee Chang-Dong’s Poetry (2010).

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