A small budget, and two kinds of film

If someone unused to the term hears “independent film,” the writer of the notes admits, they may feel at sea — they once did. An independent film, they write, is made without a large distributor or sponsor; mid- and small-scale productions are also classed that way, because the idea of sponsorship is already set by size. When actors invest their own money and a director spends private funds, the notes use a separate name: a self-produced film. Such work often runs at a loss, and so is made less and less, though a rare success can, they add, return a great deal.

In Korea, they write, art films are often made as independents. An art film leaves the story-first American style, dwells on social or psychological phenomena, and pursues artistic beauty more than a commercial aim. Large firms put money first, and so rarely back low-return art films. That, in this telling, is why the two categories so often meet.

Two cousins, a refusal to sign, and a title left in Korean

Dongju, they write, was directed by Lee Joon-ik, produced and written by Shin Yeon-shik, and played by Kang Ha-neul and Park Jung-min, with Kim In-woo, Choi Hong-il, Min Jin-woong and Moon Sung-keun also in the cast. The genre is drama; the company is Luz Y Sonidos. The budget was some 600 million won — low, in their accounting, and later offered as a high-risk, high-return success. In the Japanese colonial period, the cousins Dong-ju and Mong-gyu grow up together and go to Japan to study. Mong-gyu takes up the independence movement but does not pull Dong-ju in; Dong-ju feels shame at his own passivity. He refuses to sign, leaves the title of the collection Sky, Wind, Stars and Poems in Korean, and ends his life in prison. Those plot facts stay as the notes write them.

Black and white, a quiet face, and more than a million admissions

The film, the writer says, does not press a theme hard; it only shows, thoroughly, and then asks a sharp question: are you Song Mong-gyu, or Yun Dong-ju? In Yun’s speaking Korean to the end, they find a softness outside and a strength inside. A key scene is the argument in which Dong-ju says that poetry can also change the world, and Mong-gyu says that literature is a place to hide. The poem the notes call a “foreword” is reread as a record of a life spent in constant reflection. The black-and-white photography is compared to Schindler’s List and to Jiseul, a deliberate choice, they say, for a bleak time; the acting keeps the face almost still, so that a life can be seen more objectively. With little expectation of a hit, word of mouth and scores carried the film back up the charts, and it gathered 1,167,808 admissions. That count stays in the window the notes give, not recast as a later official total. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of the independent film Dongju, with the budget of some 600 million won and the 1,167,808 admissions left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026