Last month, the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) retrieved 94 classic Korean films, thought to be lost, from the private collection of HAN Gyu-ho. The discovery was significant, spanning films from 1949 to 1981 and including titles from some of Korea’s most revered cineastes. Among them, a pair of films by director KIM Soo-yong were also found: The Heir (1965), which deals with an internal battle over an inheritance when a corporate head passes away; and Full Ship (1967), dealing with the trials and tribulations of fishermen out on the open sea.
  
Director KIM is one of Korea’s most prolific filmmakers, second only to GO Yeong-nam with 106 films, but he is also one of the most acclaimed directors to have contributed to Korean cinema in the 1960s and 70s. On the strength of his progressive, aesthetic and often modernist works, in recent years, his stature has steadily grown, having been the focus of a Korean Cinema Retrospective at the 7th Busan International Film Festival in 2002 (entitled ‘Kim Soo-yong: An Aesthete Bridging Tradition and Modernism’) and later the subject of a dedicated DVD boxset from KOFA. Yet he still remains relatively unknown, but as more of his films are discovered (his film Sorrow Even Up in Heaven (1965) was also rediscovered last year at the Taipei Film Archive) and become available for public consumption, for instance on open platforms such as KOFA’s official Youtube channel, his stature appears to be on the rise, and eager film lovers will have a chance to experience his eclectic filmography.
  
Born in 1929 KIM pursued an education at Seoul National University before he helmed his first film A Henpecked Husband , in 1958. Extremely active throughout the 1960s, KIM frequently sought to adapt literary or stage works. Among his earliest recognized artistic achievements is the social drama Kinship , which came in 1963. In later years his increasingly complex films began to contrast the starkly opposed forces of traditionalism and modernism in contemporary Korea, as well as the roles of women, especially as wives and mothers.
  
In 1965, he released one of his most famous works, The Seaside Village . Dealing with the inhabitants of a fishing island, KIM’s film offered a frank examination of sexuality in Korea. Yet during a time when filmmakers were faced with intense scrutiny in the form of government censorship, The Seaside Village had to find clever ways of getting its message across. Thus KIM laced his work with suggestive imagery, such as the orgasmic ebb and flow of the sea’s lapping tide and the handsy nature of the island’s inhabitants, as they massage each other’s calves and rub against one another pulling in the fishing nets on the shore.
  
His next classic The Foggy Town was released two years later. Exploring the tension between the past and present, KIM placed a middle-class Seoulite on a journey to the countryside, where he meets a young teacher, who feels suffocated in the rigid confines of her life. Eschewing conventional narrative and technical methods, KIM delivered a work that pushed the envelope for its time, something more akin to a reverie revelling in experimentation.
  
In the 1970s, a time that was even more constrictive for filmmakers, KIM was no less formally daring, offering works that explored taboos in society more explicitly. He wasn’t always able to get away with it, as was demonstrated in 1973 when he made Night Voyage , starring YOON Jung-hee. The film was not able to get past censorship and remained unreleased until a cut version was approved in 1977. The film took a dark stance on the Korea of its day, depicting salarymen drinking to excess every night and women lost to their boredom and the stifling barriers of their social roles.
  
KIM took perhaps his greatest gamble with A Splendid Outing (1978), which starred YOON as a successful corporate head who is inexplicably drawn to the seaside, kidnapped by fishermen and sold to a gruff man on a backward island claiming to be her husband. Starkly juxtaposing Seoul with the jagged rocks and mottled green of the island, A Splendid Outing is an ominous work, filled with a cacophonous shamanistic soundtrack, foreboding dreams and a despairing sense of inevitability.
  
Constantly putting his characters on journeys, forcibly or of their own accord, and often both literally and metaphorically, KIM strove to ask questions of the society he lived in that few others dared to. As the faint light pointed towards him begins to grow, so too does an opportunity emerge to revisit darker periods of Korea’s modern history through his gutsy, forward-thinking work.