What Korean cinema understood before anyone else was that genre is not a limitation. It is a container into which you can pour almost anything: class anxiety, historical guilt, the particular vertigo of a country that remade itself twice in one generation. Bong Joon-ho makes thrillers. He also makes arguments.
The index here is growing faster than any other region in the map — 204 works and rising. The television entry is unusually large (18%) for a city this size, a direct consequence of the streaming decade: Seoul became a global export machine and the catalog followed.
What I keep returning to is the earlier work — Memories of Murder specifically. Bong had not yet learned to be internationally legible; the film is stranger, flatter, more specific. Lee Chang-dong, across his work, maintains this quality. Burning is a film about something that never quite happens, which is a very Korean way of making something very precise.