Park was the first filmmaker of the Sixth Republic to get to play with American money. His first movie in English, the 2013 film "Stoker," is a mirror held up to the relationship between the governments of North and South Korea and the ever-widening rift between the South Koreans themselves. In it, a broken family is breached by a long-lost, black sheep uncle who seeks to pervert the happiness he sees, unaware that they are already twisted in their own way. In Kim Jee-Woon's English-language "The Last Stand," another film obsessed by infiltrating borders, Arnold Schwarzenegger (another cold war ex-pat) has to stop a criminal and his gang from leaving the United States for Mexico. This wasn’t the first time the US have been name-checked by the Sixth Republic. Kim Jin-won’s "The Butcher" and Im Sang-Soo’s "The Taste of Money" hint at nefarious US influences afflicting South Korea. Each new voice had something to say about what caused the heartsickness of their country but there was no more astute a diagnostician south of the 39th than Bong Joon-Ho.
In Bong’s early features, upheaval broils beneath a satisfying, engrossing generic surface. 2003’s "Memories of Murder" plays like an early '70s American crime thriller in Bong's desire to expose the corruption and inefficiency of the South Korean police force before the film can get around to solving its central crime. His 2006 film "The Host" blames a shady US Army bureaucrat for the creation of a fish-monster in the sewers below Seoul; Godzilla in miniature, released the same year that Kim Jong-Il’s North Korean government tested some of its nuclear weapons. In Bong’s next feature, the Oedipal noir "Mother," a middle-aged woman goes looking for proof that her son is innocent of murder and doesn't like what she finds. One can imagine similar disappointment when South Korean civilians realized that President Kim Dae-jung’s efforts to broker a treaty with the North Korean leadership under the auspices of the Sunshine Policy were the result of bribes and corruption; allegations that came to light after Kim had been given the Nobel Prize for his actions. Kim died in 2009, the same year "Mother" premiered and another nuclear weapons demonstration took place. 2009 also saw the release of another film about mother nature rebelling against her tormentors: "Chaw" by Shin Jeong-Won about a giant warthog hunting the rich in a resort town. All this mere months after the Sunshine Policy fell apart following the murder of a Southern tourist named Park Wang-Ja by Northern soldiers in a supposedly safe zone. Incidents like that remind one that neither country has ever signed a peace treaty after the war that split them ended in 1953. In the wake of this avalanche of defeat, the Sixth Republic filmmakers with a significant following and an interest in criticizing the state started moving to greener pastures. The truth was being buried alive and they didn’t want to go with it.