"Kim Ki-young’s HANYO, or THE HOUSEMAID, is one of the true classics of
South Korean cinema, and when I finally had the opportunity to see the picture,
I was startled. That this intensely, claustrophobic film is known only to the most
devoted film lovers in the west is one of the great accidents of film history.” —Martin Scorsese.
“From the point of view of a Westerner, the discovery of a film
like THE HOUSEMAID, more than 40 years after it was made, is a marvelous
feeling—marvelous not just because one finds in writer-director Kim Ki-young a truly extraordinary image-maker, but in his film such an utterly unpredictable
work. So Luis Buñuel had a Korean brother!…” —Jean-Michel Frodon
Only recently discovered by occidental audiences, THE HOUSEMAID is the first
film in director Kim Ki-Young’s trilogy of domestic ruin. This groundbreaking
chamber piece, fraught with psychosexual madness, is now celebrated as one
of the greatest Korean films of all time. It tells the story of Dong-sik (Kim
Jin-kyu), a middle-class composer who gives music lessons at a local textiles
factory in Geumcheon. Dong-sik invites chaos into his home when he begins
an extramarital affair with the family’s mysterious new maid (Lee Eun-shim), a
disturbed woman with a penchant for catching rats with her bare hands.
The
print featured has been restored by the Korean Film Archive with the support
of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, a nonprofit organization
dedicated to the preservation of films from non-Western countries.
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