South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk dies at 59 from coronavirus

Filmmaker Kim Ki-duk at the Moscow Film Festival in 2019. FPavel Golovkin / AP

South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk has died at the age of 59 in Latvia from complications derived from covid-19, according to media in his country.

The director of

or

was in the Baltic country preparing his next feature film since last November 20 and, according to the Latvian website

, he died last morning.

The son of peasants, Kim Ki-duk (Bonghwa, 1960) was a bricklayer, belonged to the Marines (the US and South Korea are the only two countries with this military body), and studied painting and sculpture in Paris from 1990 to 1992 before dedicating himself to cinema: “I decided to make films after a trip to Europe.

Something changed about my perception of life, I began to question many prejudices with which I had been raised.

When I returned to my country I started shooting ”.

“To make films,” he explained in an interview with EL PAÍS in 2005 at the San Sebastián festival, where he presented

“the important thing is to live life.

For me it has been the best school ”.

His films, 23 feature films, experienced a festive fervor in the first decade of the 20th century.

And he became one of the figures of the European theaters of the original version: “I suppose that big productions are a temptation for many directors.

It is not my case, I want to preserve my idea of ​​cinema and accepting a large budget would mean assuming a series of conditions that I am not interested in accepting.

I prefer to work with limited means ”.

Kim, with a powerful physique thanks to his military past, traveled the European continent during those years.

His cinema was based both on beauty and a sexuality that used to lead directly to violence.

Although he made his debut in 1996 with

the filmmaker entered the radar of European moviegoers with

(2000).

With that film some dust arose with two sequences of animal abuse (a frog was beaten to death and then skinned, and in another a fish was mutilated).

Kim argued that in the West, food is acquired without thinking about where it comes from - or how these animals are slaughtered - and that he would continue to film something that was natural in his country.

In Spain Domicilio unknown (2001) was not as popular as

(2003), the relationship between a boy and the Buddhist monk who educates him in a remote floating temple.

The following year he achieved a formidable festival double: at the Berlinale he won the award for best director with

the story of an

prostitute

, and at the Venice

contest he

won a Silver Lion and the critics award, It was followed by the Golden Spike at the Seminci in Valladolid and ended up being chosen by international critics as the best film of the year.

These titles were followed, among others, by

(2005),

(2006),

(2007),

(2008), the documentary

(2011) —winner of the section A certain look at Cannes—,

( 2011) or

(2012), León de Oro in Venice, where he expressed his talent to show violence on screen, which also garnered criticism calling him a misogynist.

“I don't think my films are especially impassable.

If something is not understood, perhaps it must be seen a second time.

If the second time is not clear either, give it another chance.

All films contain secrets and those secrets are being discovered little by little ”, he assured.

When he wanted to release

(2013), the portrait of the destruction of a family victim of incestuous desires, the Government of his country refused to let him go to commercial theaters, since it included content "harmful to youth" and "immoral expressions and antisocial ”.

The Korean Directors' Association supported him in his war against censorship.

However, eventually, Kim trimmed the footage so that he could show it to his compatriots.

So much controversy reached him: in 2017 an actress accused him of sexual assault on the set of his movie

.

The actress denounced that she had beaten him repeatedly before forcing him to participate in a sexual sequence of which he had not been previously informed.

The following year, three other actresses accused him and his regular collaborator, actor Cho Jae-hyun, of sexual assault, although they did not report him.

Kim was declared innocent of the sexual violence charge in January 2019 due to lack of evidence, not for the assault charge, which resulted in a penalty of about 4,000 euros.

Upon being exonerated, the filmmaker sued the actress and the authors of a documentary about him, for damage to his image, but lost in court. Because of these legal incidents, the producers abandoned him, and he could only shoot in Kazakhstan, where he filmed

(2019).