My Sassy Girl, the 2001 South Korean romantic comedy that helped open Korean cinema to international audiences, has been restored in 4K from the original negative for its 25th anniversary. It plays at the New York Asian Film Festival on July 18 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Film Movement handles the wider theatrical release this fall.
Kwak Jae-yong based it on blog posts a Korean man wrote about a woman he met on the subway. It became one of the highest-grossing Korean comedies ever, a phenomenon years before streaming made Hallyu impossible to miss. Jun Ji-hyun and Cha Tae-hyun play the leads.
If you got into K-drama anywhere in the last decade, this is the film that made the template. Genre-mixing, melancholy underneath the comedy, and a female lead unlike anyone else onscreen at the time.
Before this: Il Mare (2000).
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