Part art film, part grindhouse nightmare, Kim Ki-young’s delirious riff on his own 1960 film The Housemaid is a cornerstone of 1970s Korean cinema, starring Youn Yuh-jung (2021 Oscar winner for Minari) in her screen debut.

Long marginalized and now reclaimed as a landmark of Korean queer cinema, Ha Gil-jong’s debut feature traps a powerful businessman, his mistress, and his young male secretary in a slow-burn game of seduction, domination, and betrayal.

Over-the-top anti-Communist pulp is filtered through actor-director Park No-sik’s eccentric, anything-goes filmmaking as Park’s bumpkin-hero Yong-pal follows a young woman to Japan and both tumble into a Chongryon-linked gangster maze.

A young woman on her way to the sea (Moon Sook in her debut) meets a man suspected of murder (Shin Seong-il) as Lee Man-hee’s luminous film blows past the rules of both romance and thriller.

Carried by one of the great Korean pop soundtracks, Lee Jang-ho’s debut, following an ordinary young woman whose serial betrayals by men push her toward the bar hostess life, broke Korean box office records and launched a generation.

A Korean street fighter famed for slapping villains in the face with his foot takes one last job that blows everything up in the high-water mark of the tae kwon do action films Lee Doo-yong and Korean American star Han Yong-cheol.

A family is living the capitalist dream after winning the lottery—until the daughter is suddenly seized by violent fits. Drawing inspiration from The Exorcist, Lee Jang-ho fuses supernatural horror with melodrama in an audacious film that feels possessed in its own right.

Jagged, funny, and shot through with self-mockery, Ha Gil-jong’s portrait of two philosophy students drifting through campus life under the Yushin dictatorship became a generational touchstone.

Yeom Bok-soon’s indelibly funny and heartbreaking performance anchors one of the key “hostess melodramas” of the 1970s, Kim Ho-sun’s story of a young woman who arrives in Seoul from the countryside with nothing but ambition and ends up with less than that.

Jang Il-ho brings a brisk, pulpy snap to this adaptation of a manga by Japanese horror master Kazuo Umezu, starring Yu Ji-in as a woman born with the face of a cat who demands her plastic-surgeon father fix what he’s done.

Before Mandala and Sopyonje, this haunting story of a man who finds everything has changed in his Seoul neighborhood after 14 years abroad is where Im Kwon-taek the artist began to emerge.

Kim Ki-young’s haunted-island mystery stands as one of his most audacious works: a deranged coastal noir about a zealous hotel developer drawn to an off‑the‑map island community ruled by women and guarded by shamanic ritual.

Rare in 1970s Korean cinema for treating its female protagonist as a full subject, Kim Soo-yong’s film about the psychological unraveling of a restless bank clerk pushed Korean cinema’s expressive range into new territory.

Yun Jeong‑hee (Lee Chang‑dong’s Poetry) gives an extraordinary performance as a successful executive who is abducted to a remote island, where a man insists she is his vanished wife, in Kim Soo-yong’s enigmatic social portrait.

Lim Jeong-gyu’s proudly original debut—about two feral kids who grew up in a cave until a kindly tae kwon do master turns them into unstoppable kicking machines—set a Korean animation box-office record that held for more than a decade.

Genre and tone mutate restlessly—noir drifts into horror, eroticism into absurdism, philosophy into pulp—in one of Kim Ki-young’s most unclassifiable films, frequently cited as a pinnacle of 1970s Korean cult cinema.

A proud patriarch is faced with an impossible choice when he refuses to adopt a Japanese name during the colonial era in Im Kwon-taek’s meditation on conviction, heritage, and identity.

Lee Doo-yong’s towering masterpiece turns a sprawling procedural about a detective tracking a killer into a full-scale excavation of Korea’s buried history.

Kim Jee-woon’s fast and funny 1970s-set feature about a director’s (Parasite’s Song Kang-ho) frantic attempt to reshoot the ending of his latest movie channels the spirit of cinema that this series celebrates.

Raw, defiant, and visionary, these short films—one section of the fiercely collective and formally subversive work of Kaidu Club, the other the quietly personal and observational films of Kim Hong-joon and Hwang Ju-ho—represent crucial precursors to Korean independent cinema that opened alternative paths for filmmaking outside the mainstream.

This free exhibition of moving image works will take place Saturday, May 16 and Sunday, May 17 in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery inside the Walter Reade Theater.