Memories of Murder

Colour, 35 mm
Korea, 2003, 127 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

This movie, which broke box office records at home, is one of the most debated Korean films of the past year. The story was inspired by real events – a series of unsolved murders which happened between 1986 and 1991 in the small town of Hwa-sung not far from Seoul. Over the course of six years, ten women were raped and murdered within a radius of two kilometres. Among them a 71-year-old grandmother and a 13-year-old girl, and there doesn’t seem to be any connection the police can make. Detectives Cho, Park and Seo interrogate around  300,000 policemen to help with the investigation. But to catch and convict an elusive mass murderer whose cold-bloodedness in a nightmare even for the most experienced of professionals, is a task which is clearly beyond human strength... Director Bong Joon-ho dedicated his film to the ten woman who, were it not for those ten terrrible rainy evenings, might still be alive.

About the director

Bong Joon-ho, who has a number of short films to his credit – White Man, The Memories in My Frame and Incoherence – made his debut in 1999 with the feature Barking Dogs Never Bite, which was shown in the overview New Korean Cinema at Karlovy Vary in 2001. The director said about his second film: "I like criminal films, which is why I chose this theme. I hesitated for a long time about whether I had the right to make the film. I thought of the families of the victims, because this isn’t a detective story thought up just to be unravelled, but a real event, accompanied by horror, grief, pain and the anger of the bereaved. I am very sorry for those women who died in such cruel circumstances, but I also wanted to show the investigators, who at that time were under exceptional pressure from the public, as human beings who had feelings, and were desperately trying to catch the murderer.”