'Forbidden' fruit: Among the dozen films being shown as part of the "New York Korean Film Festival" at BAM Rose Cinemas is "Forbidden Quest," Kim Dae-woo's lavish costume film about porn in Korea's feudal past.

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Somewhere deep inside them, in some pessimistic corner, the creators and fans are always anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop. But so far the renaissance of South Korea’s cinema, which began in the late ’90s after almost three decades of doldrums, is holding strong.

This is one of the relatively few local film industries thriving in the face of the global Hollywood juggernaut. According to the authoritative Darcy’s Korean Film Page (www.koreanfilm.org), Korea has almost doubled its yearly output in a decade and local movies now regularly capture over 50 percent of the annual box office despite Harry Potter, Superman and all their ilk.

It also, incidentally, turns out some awfully good movies.

By now it’s a tradition for BAMcinematek to host one leg of the New York Korean Film Festival; the fourth annual visitation spans Aug. 30-Sept. 3 (preceded by screenings at other venues in Manhattan). But in all the attention paid to Korean film’s present, its past is virtually unknown to most of the world, and not enormously appreciated even at home. This year, the fest programmers have decided to do something about that with a retrospective section, a feature they hope to make a regular part of the NYKFF.

The eight recent selections at BAM will be joined by four classics from recently rediscovered director Lee Man-hee: the macabre thriller "The Devil’s Stairway" (1964; screens Aug. 30) and the melodramas "Water Mill" (1966; Aug. 30), "A Road to Return" (1967; Aug. 31), and "A Way to Sampo" (1975; Aug. 31).

Sueyoung Park-Primiano, a doctoral candidate at New York University specializing in Korean film, will lecture on Lee at the Korea Society on Aug. 29. Commenting via e-mail, she says that it was Lee’s 1967 gangster film "The Starting Point" that "shifted my interest from contemporary Korean films to 1950s and 1960s Korean cinema. Until then, I thought most of the older films were weepy melodramas with obvious genre conventions, but within the first few minutes, I was gripped by the narrative and the fast action editing."

In a mere 15-year career, Lee directed 51 movies (of which roughly 24 are known to survive); he succumbed to cirrhosis and cancer while working at the editing table on "Way to Sampo."

"He was generally known to be a commercially popular filmmaker," continues Park-Primiano, "but he was also respected as an artistic filmmaker by his contemporaries and film critics. He excelled in many genres, and I suspect this is one of the reasons why he may not have been studied as an auteuruntil now of course. I know of at least two Korean scholars whose dissertation topic is on Lee."

The popularity and acclaim of Lee’s war sagas and crime stories "opened the door to his experiments with social dramas that explored the lives of the disenfranchised and the low life." Two sides of this coin are well demonstrated by "Water Mill" and "Road to Return," which use widely differing settings - a rural village in the historical past and the contemporary middle-class city - to portray marriages broken down by outside social stresses and eventual infidelity. For all the soap operatic qualities, they’re both marked by an exquisitely sensitive eye for the way the characters fit into a landscape or a cityscape that overwhelms them, just as societal convention does.

Moving from Lee’s ’60s movies to those from the past year or so is like journeying to another planet. The rigid familial and romantic proprieties give way to a world of footloose singles searching for their mates via cell phone and Internet dating in "My Scary Girl" (2006; Sept. 1) and "Wedding Campaign" (2005; Sept. 3). Each attempts, with fair success, to put a new spin on current Korean cinema’s most heavily exploited genre, the romantic comedy. The former movie folds in murder and farcical efforts at corpse disposal; the latter explores the little-known world of the substantial Korean diaspora in, of all places, Uzbekistan. ("Rules of Dating" (2005), playing Sept. 2, also takes a crack at the formula).

Koreans abroad are examined to very different effect in "Grain in Ear" (2005; Sept. 3), a co-production with China about a Korean-Chinese single mother ground down by her life in a bleak industrial town. The Lee Man-hee approach of infusing social comment with narrative and visual fire is eschewed in favor of the stark minimalism that seems obligatory in socially conscious art films from Asia these days - though the shocking final twist is worthy of him.

The eclecticism of the Korean renaissance is further testified by the psychological character study-cum-romance "The Charming Girl" (2005; Sept. 1); the animated science fiction adventure "Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles" (2006; Sept. 3), a continuation of the internationally popular TV series; and "The Aggressives!" (2005; Sept. 3) about the relationships among a group of teenage in-line skaters.

One of the most intriguing of the new batch is director Kim Dae-woo’s "Forbidden Quest" (2006; Sept. 2) - a lavish costume film about porn in Korea’s feudal past. Following an aristocratic scholar as he plunges into the underground world of illegal (and enormously popular) erotic literature, it shows unquenchable human urges battling cruel repression and makes it look like fun. Vigorous to a fault, funny, sexy, touching and occasionally violent, it might have made Lee Man-hee proud if he had lived to see it.

"The 2006 New York Korean Film Festival" plays Aug. 30-Sept. 3 at BAM Rose Cinemas (30 Lafayette Ave. at Ashland Place in Fort Greene). Admission is $10, or $7 for seniors, students with ID (Monday-Thursday) and children. For more information, call (718) 636-4100 or visit the Web site www.bam.org. Complete festival schedule and related events at www.KoreanFilmFestival.org.

Sueyoung Park-Primiano will speak on the life and films of Lee Man-hee on Aug. 29 at 6:30 pm at the Korea Society, 950 Third Ave. at 57th St., eighth floor in Manhattan. Admission is $5. For more information, call (212) 759-7525.

©2006 Community Newspaper Group