'Made for Sitges?' The reception of the South Korean thriller in Spain through the case study of the Sitges Film Festival

Abstract

The New Korean Cinema has a direct translation into the programming and structure of the Sitges Film Festival since its emergence in the late nineties. The figures show how in a very short period of time Korean cinematography acquires a progressive visibility until reaching unsuspected levels. For its part, the Sitges Film Festival finds in Korean cinematography unclassifiable images that allow it to explore some of the tropes characteristic of its identity: the taste for cinematographic genrr, the representation of violence from heterodox perspectives and, finally, the black humor as a distancing mechanism. Our starting hypothesis is that all these elements condition the reception process of the New Korean Cinema, building a certain paratext that will have a strong influence on the reception process of this cinematography. To make our argument, we first address what and how the evolution of the contest has been since the beginning of the movement; second, we take as a corpus of analysis the most relevant South Korean thrillers that have been part of the program of the contest in order to determine and define its thematic and aesthetic axes; and in the third and last place, we compare these results with the reception of the films both by the critics and with those tropes from which the identity that defines the Sitges Film Festival has been sedimented.