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    In ‘The Last of the Sea Women,’ Divers Face a Vanishing Way of Life

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    The film captures the arduous work of South Korean haenyeo, who harvest seafood without diving gear, and whose traditions may be ending.In the South Korean province of Jeju lives a group of women who may, at first, sound as if they’re mythical creatures. The haenyeo (“sea women”) dive and swim in the depths of the ocean without any breathing gear, harvesting seafood like conch, urchin and octopus, which they sell to support their families. Often, haenyeo are the main earners in their households. They’ve done this for centuries.That is remarkable enough on its own. Free diving — without breathing apparatus other than your own lungs — is incredibly physically demanding and dangerous. Jellyfish and sharks lurk, and bad weather can pose a hazard, too. Some of the haenyeo dive for two full minutes without coming up for air, all while gathering marine life.But what’s more extraordinary — and what’s explored in “The Last of the Sea Women” (on Apple TV+), directed by Sue Kim — is this astonishing fact: Most of the haenyeo are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. For them, it’s both a point of pride that they’re still doing the work — “men can’t handle this job,” Soon Deok Jang, 72, notes with a grin — and a grave concern.That is because they have been at this a long time. Yet in recent decades, their numbers have dwindled from tens of thousands to about 4,000. Few young women join the community anymore, and the divers worry that their way of life is disappearing. “I feel like the haenyeo culture is melting away,” one says, referring not only their work, but also their camaraderie and empowerment.Kim takes a lightly ethnographic approach, melding an observational eye with conversations with the women. She follows the haenyeo into the sea, hangs out with them as they wait at the crack of dawn for transportation to the water and attends meetings where they discuss how to preserve haenyeo culture.And, as the film shows, there are a few encouraging signs. There’s a school for new haenyeo, though the grueling demands of yearlong training and the work itself mean only about 5 percent of graduates continue on. The film also focuses on Sohee Jin and Jeongmin Woo, who are in their 30s and the youngest by far among the haenyeo. They initially connected over that fact, and now they post videos to YouTube and Instagram to draw attention to their work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Controversy Over K-pop Band NewJeans

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      The firm Hybe has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in market value because of a feud with the creative force behind the band NewJeans.The video had none of the hallmarks of K-pop. No catchy tune, no snazzy outfits, no slick dance routines. Definitely no stars. It was set in an unremarkable auditorium with plain white tables and a large projector screen.But it included screenshots of chats between two power players in the industry and instantly became the talk of the K-pop world.It was the live broadcast of a two-hour emotional tell-all delivered last month by Min Hee-Jin, the producer of NewJeans, arguably today’s hottest K-pop act. She had called a news conference to dispute accusations of corporate malfeasance by her employer, Hybe, the K-pop colossus behind BTS.The unusually public and hostile feud — which has included allegations of plagiarism, chart rigging and shamanism — has led to hundreds of millions of dollars being wiped off Hybe’s market value. And it has cast a cloud over Hybe’s relationship with a rising star, NewJeans, while its biggest act, BTS, is on hiatus.“It’s about money, it’s about control and also the ownership of an artist,” said Andrew Eungi Kim, referring to NewJeans. A professor at Korea University, Mr. Kim studies the country’s cultural influence, a phenomenon known as hallyu.The members of BTS, who are all serving in South Korea’s military because of mandatory conscription, are not expected to reunite until next year. As some of them have released solo albums, NewJeans has racked up its share of accolades. In the past year it has topped the Billboard 200, played at Lollapalooza and appeared in commercials for Apple and Coca-Cola.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Insooni Breaks Racial Barrier to Become Beloved Singer in South Korea

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      Born to a South Korean mother and a Black American soldier, she rose to a pioneering stardom in a country that has long discriminated against biracial children.When she took the stage to perform at Carnegie Hall in front of 107 Korean War veterans, the singer Kim Insoon was thinking of her father, an American soldier stationed in South Korea during the postwar decades whom she had never met or even seen.“You are my fathers,” she told the soldiers in the audience before singing “Father,” one of her Korean-language hits.“To me, the United States has always been my father’s country,” Ms. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling that 2010 performance. “It was also the first place where I wanted to show how successful I had become — without him and in spite of him.”Ms. Kim, born in 1957, is better known as Insooni in South Korea, where she is a household name. For over four decades, she has won fans across generations with her passionate and powerful singing style and genre-crossing performances. Fathered by a Black American soldier, she also broke the racial barrier in a country deeply prejudiced against biracial people, especially those born to Korean women and African-American G.I.s.Insooni at a concert in Seoul in March.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesHer enduring and pioneering presence in South Korea’s pop scene helped pave the way for future K-pop groups to globalize with multiethnic lineups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A K-Pop Star’s Lonely Downward Spiral

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      Goo Hara’s life was a struggle from the start. She ended it at 28, isolated and harassed online.The K-pop star looked utterly drained. Her face scrubbed of makeup, Goo Hara, one of South Korea’s most popular musical artists, gazed into the camera during an Instagram livestream from a hotel room in Japan. In a fading voice, she read questions from fans watching from around the world.“You going to work, fighting?” one asked.In halting English, she gave a plaintive answer: “My life is always so fighting.”By the time she climbed into bed at the end of the livestream in November 2019, she had reached a low point after a lifetime of struggle. As a child, she was abandoned by her parents. Her father at one point attempted suicide. After grueling training, she debuted in a K-pop group at 17, early even by the standards of the Korean hit-making machine.With the group, Kara, she found international fame, and Ms. Goo became a regular on Korean television, eventually anchoring her own reality series. But with celebrity came ravenous attacks on social media from a Korean public that is as quick to criticize stars as it is to fawn over them. Following a sordid legal fight with an ex-boyfriend, the harassment only intensified, as commenters criticized her looks, her personality and her sex life.Ms. Goo in 2018, the year before she died by suicide.Choi Soo-Young/Imazins, via Getty ImagesOn Nov. 23, 2019, less than a week after her Instagram appearance, she posted a photo of herself tucked in bed, with the caption “Good night.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lee Hoyang, Prolific K-Pop Producer and Songwriter, Dies at 40

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      Professionally known as Shinsadong Tiger, he created the upbeat, catchy and danceable musical style that defined K-pop in the early 2010s.Lee Hoyang, a prolific producer and songwriter of South Korean pop music who was professionally known as Shinsadong Tiger and who helped create some of the biggest K-pop hits of the 2010s, died in Seoul on Friday. He was 40.His management agency confirmed his death in a statement. It did not mention the cause of death, but said that a private funeral was being held in Seoul. The agency, TR Entertainment, did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A police detective in Seoul also confirmed Mr. Lee’s death, but would not disclose further details. Mr. Lee was often credited with shaping the musical style that defined K-pop in the early 2010s: catchy, upbeat and repetitive with a strong hook. He produced many commercially successful songs throughout the decade, mostly for young female artists. Among the hits were “Roly-Poly” and “Bo Peep Bo Peep,” both by T-ara; “NoNoNo” by Apink; and “Bubble Pop!” by HyunA.“He created an exciting, funky, beat-driven K-pop style that continues to be repeated over and over again,” said Do Heon Kim, a pop music critic in South Korea. “There is no place where his influence hasn’t been felt.”Mr. Lee was born on June 3, 1983, in Pohang, a city on South Korea’s southeastern coast. With no formal music education, he immersed himself in music starting in middle school, when he played in a band and remixed songs with his friends, he said in an interview in 2011.He debuted as a songwriter in 2004, when he produced a song called “Man and Woman” for the South Korean pop band the Jadu, he said. The song, which had a pulse of Brazilian bossa nova, was released in 2005.Mr. Lee’s career took a downturn in the late 2010s as his music came to be increasingly regarded as repetitive and he was faced with plagiarism accusations, which he denied, Mr. Kim said. The songwriter focused more of his energy on producing and helped form the girl groups EXID, which debuted in 2012, and Tri.be, which debuted in 2021.Jin Yu Young More

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      ‘Cobweb’ Review: A Film Within a Director’s Cinematic Ego Trip

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      Kim Jee-woon toys with the absurdity of filmmaking itself in this story of a director compelled to take his cast and crew captive to shoot one more scene.To be a director is to be a madman of sorts. It’s a rare artist that has the will and belief required to pull together so many forces to create a movie, let alone a good or even great one. In other words, it’s a space only occupied, perhaps, by the delusional or self-involved.“Cobweb,” directed by Kim Jee-woon, mines the comically absurd reality that is filmmaking, at times with bouncy cinematic verve, at others somewhat aimlessly and a little too indulgently.In the film, set in early-1970s South Korea, a director, Kim (Song Kang-ho), desperately struggling to prove he isn’t a sham, has come up with a new ending to fix his current film that he insists will transform it into a subversive masterpiece. Working surreptitiously around his studio’s president and the government censorship agency, he reconvenes his cast and crew, boards them up in a sound stage, and gets to work on his opus. Personalities clash and antics ensue, as the movie set becomes as much of a soap opera as the movie they’re making, whose scenes are cut into “Cobweb” throughout.Even if “Cobweb” often feels like it’s a film that is telling itself its own industry insider joke — poking fun at the competing, wounded egos of directors, actors and studio brass — Kim Jee-woon captures it all with a sleekly choreographed charm that keeps us along for the ride. Until it doesn’t. Toward the second half, the film becomes overlong, losing its narrative thread and including too many scenes of the movie being made. Eventually we feel a little trapped in the sound stage ourselves, as “Cobweb” falls victim, ironically, to its own punchline — becoming a movie that is too obsessed with itself.CobwebNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Parasite’ Actor Lee Sun-kyun Found Dead at 48

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      Mr. Lee, a familiar face on Korean television and movie screens, rose to international fame after starring in the Oscar-winning film.Lee Sun-kyun, the award-winning South Korean actor who rose to international fame after starring in the Oscar-winning film “Parasite,” was found dead in Seoul on Wednesday. He was 48.Mr. Lee had recently been under police investigation on suspicion of illegal drug use, and he denied the accusations. The police said they were investigating the death as a suicide.The police found Mr. Lee’s body in a parked vehicle in central Seoul just before 11 a.m., said Jeon Yu-deung, the chief detective at Seongbuk police station, which is investigating his death. After Mr. Lee’s manager reported him missing earlier in the day, the police found his body using the location signal from his phone. Mr. Jeon said that Mr. Lee had also left what appeared to be a suicide note.Mr. Lee is survived by his wife, two sons and siblings, Mr. Jeon added. His talent agency, Hodu&U Entertainment, said in a statement that a funeral would be held privately and attended by his family and colleagues.Mr. Lee, who was born in Seoul in 1975, studied acting at the Korea National University of Arts and made his first professional appearance in a 1999 music video. He became a familiar face on Korean television when he starred in the dramas “Coffee Prince” and “Behind the White Tower” in 2007. He also played lead roles in the 2010 romantic comedy series “Pasta,” the 2012 thriller “Helpless” and the 2018 psychological drama “My Mister.”Mr. Lee received worldwide recognition for his performance in “Parasite,” a 2019 thriller in which he played the head of a wealthy family in whose house much of the movie takes place. That film won four awards at the Academy Awards in 2020, including for best picture, becoming the first non-English movie to win the award. He and his castmates won a Screen Actors Guild award for their roles.In 2022, Mr. Lee was nominated for best actor at the international Emmy awards for his role in the sci-fi thriller “Dr. Brain.”Police officers investigating a vehicle in which the body of Mr. Lee was found in central Seoul on Wednesday.Yonhap, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Lee had been repeatedly questioned by the police in Incheon, a city west of Seoul, since October on suspicion of taking illicit drugs. He denied the accusations in several public statements and said he was the target of a blackmail effort.“I ask that the police make a good judgment about whose side’s statements are credible between me and the blackmailers,” he told reporters this week following a 19-hour interrogation.South Korea’s entertainment industry has recently been shaken by drug abuse scandals amid a nationwide antidrug campaign. The police in March raided the home of Yoo Ah-in, famous for his role in the 2021 Netflix series “Hellbound,” after he tested positive for propofol, marijuana, ketamine and cocaine. South Korea has a strict approach toward drugs. Convicted offenders face six months to 14 years in prison. Citizens can be prosecuted for using illicit drugs even if they do so abroad.The authorities have recently ramped up enforcement, warning that the problem is growing. Drug arrests have surged since President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a “war on drugs.” More than 17,000 people were arrested on drug charges nationwide this year, an increase from about 10,400 in 2019, according to the National Police Agency.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States. More

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      ‘Beyond Utopia’ Review: Exit Strategies

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      This film, directed by Madeleine Gavin, documents the experiences of defectors from North Korea.“Beyond Utopia,” a documentary on defectors from North Korea, begins by pre-empting the inevitable questions about how it was made. “The film contains no recreations,” the opening titles explain. The footage, we are told, was shot by the filmmakers, the subjects and operatives in the underground network that helped those subjects escape.That access alone gives the movie an intense interest. Directed by the longtime editor Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia” pivots around Seungeun Kim, a pastor in South Korea who has spent more than two decades assisting North Koreans who want to escape the totalitarian regime. The precarious course to safety generally runs through multiple countries.There are two main rescue missions chronicled in the film. One involves Soyeon Lee, a past defector who lives in South Korea and is trying to retrieve her son from the North. At the time this documentary was shot, the boy was 17, and she had not seen him in 10 years. Does he want to defect? The mother believes so, although communication is difficult, and there is no choice but to trust middlemen.The other mission involves the Ro family — a mother, father, two children and a grandmother who have, at the time Pastor Kim gets word of them, successfully crossed the heavily guarded Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China. But they need the pastor’s network to shuttle them through Southeast Asia. Until they reach Thailand, they will be at constant risk of being returned. Some of the people who cross, Pastor Kim says, wind up being sold for sex trafficking or organ harvesting.The family’s journey forms the backbone of the film, and not only because “Beyond Utopia” has some footage of them navigating the jungle by night. (Who could even keep a camera going under those circumstances?) There is also a chance to see them adapt to an unfamiliar — and, to them, practically unbelievable — environment, and to see their reactions as they realize what they learned in North Korea was wrong. “I feel like our country must become more developed,” says the grandmother, once they have reached Vietnam. “I mean I know how intelligent our Marshal Kim Jong-un is, so are our people just not smart?”“Beyond Utopia” fills out these stories with the history of North Korea, a country that Sue Mi Terry, a former C.I.A. analyst and a producer on the film, describes as “the only communist Confucian hereditary dynasty in the world.” Defectors like the activist Hyeonseo Lee fill in the picture on what life is like there, and how propaganda could convince the North Korean populace that they are living in a utopia.The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.Beyond UtopiaRated PG-13. Descriptions of torture and brutality. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Sex, Thugs and Kidneys: ‘Bargain’ Bids to Be the Next ‘Squid Game’

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      A new Paramount+ thriller depicts a fight for survival amid sex scams, organ auctions and earthquakes. Like other Korean dramas, it is really about class.In “Bargain,” a new dystopian South Korean series on Paramount+, a man shows up at a hotel far from the city to consummate a deal. He is to pay a young woman for sex; the price is steep because she claims to be a virgin. But wait: It turns out she actually works for a criminal organ-auctioning operation, and the guy is about to unwillingly give up a kidney.Then an earthquake levels the hotel, initiating a desperate scramble for survival. And that’s just the first 30 minutes or so.There’s an almost comical amount of calamity in “Bargain,” the latest offering in the push from Paramount+ into a robust South Korean streaming market that exploded with the popularity of Netflix’s “Squid Game” in 2021. Like that show, which depicted debt-ridden citizens competing in a series of deadly, Darwinian children’s games for the amusement of wealthy overlords, “Bargain” deals in dystopian extremes. (All six episodes begin streaming on Thursday.)But these shows aren’t serving up shock for its own sake. They use dark fantasy to confront issues that plague contemporary South Korean society, particularly the economic inequality fostered by capitalism run amok; social isolation in a frenzied tech boom; and a widespread distrust of government authority.In a paradox of the South Korean streaming boom, shows that often dramatize desperate efforts to get a piece of the economic pie are proving to be big business. (Netflix, the world’s biggest streaming service, reported that 60 percent of its subscribers worldwide had watched a Korean-language show or movie in 2022; the company plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korean content over the next four years.)Jin Sun Kyu plays a man lured into a trap set by a woman posing as a prostitute. Next thing he knows, a roomful of people are bidding on his organs. Then comes the earthquake.TVING Co/Paramount+“We’ve seen a lot of demand for international content across the globe, and Korean content particularly is a phenomenon in itself,” Marco Nobili, the executive vice president and international general manager of Paramount+, said in a video interview. “Globalization has really brought that to light. So certainly Korea was a top market for us.”Paramount+ entered the arena through a film and television partnership between its parent company, Paramount Global, and the South Korean media conglomerate CJ ENM. As part of that deal, Paramount+ and the Korean streaming giant TVing, which CJ ENM controls, committed to co-producing seven original Korean series, of which “Bargain” is the second. The first, “Yonder,” about a man who reconnects with his dead wife, debuted on Paramount+ in April. (Both premiered in South Korea, on TVing, in October 2022.)At the same time, Paramount+ has begun building its K-drama library with hit shows from the CJ ENM vaults, including the 2016 procedural “Signal” and a 2017 thriller about a religious cult, “Save Me,” both of which also arrived in April.A dark, competitive thread runs through much of it; and just as the characters in Korea’s many dystopian offerings must fight for survival, there seems to be a kind of “can you top this?” contest happening among the shows themselves. The premise of “Bargain” is a little more extreme than that of “Squid Game.” Paramount+’s coming series “Pyramid Game,” in which a bullied high school girl must become a sniper in order to survive a brutal game, looks to be yet another nightmare blood sport.For Byun Seungmin, the creator of “Bargain,” the idea of toxic competition is crucial.“In South Korea, the issue of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is severe,” Byun said in a video interview last month through an interpreter. “There’s a prevailing sense of defeat that if one isn’t born into a good background, it’s difficult to have a fair opportunity to achieve something.”In “Bargain,” you can either afford to buy a kidney for your dying father (freshly carved from a captive), or you can’t. You either run a criminal empire, or what’s left of your body is fed to the fish. Near the end of the series, as the female and male lead characters (played by Jun Jong Seo and Jin Sun Kyu) try to escape the collapsing structure, one says to the other: “If we die here, we die for nothing.” The response: “People like us always die for nothing.”The hit Netflix series “Squid Game,” whose premise put contestants in a series of deadly children’s games, initiated the boom in the South Korean streaming market. Noh Juhan/Netflix“Bargain,” like “Squid Game,” offers the spectacle of millions in cash literally dangling above those who can grab it. Such images are laden with meaning, said the journalist Elise Hu, whose book “Flawless” is a deep examination of South Korea’s booming beauty industry.“You have this story in which body parts are actually getting fragmented, and organs sold and then harvested, so that you can put a price on a body,” she said last month in a phone interview. “It all flows from this moment that South Korea is in with consumption, where you can buy all the things that you want and it’s all money, money, money.”As Byun put it, “The younger generation in Korea now believes unless the system collapses, or a disaster occurs where everyone becomes truly equal, there is no opportunity for the future.”“Bargain” unfolds in a series of carefully choreographed long takes, the camera darting and gliding among the wreckage and creating a sense that, even in this dog-eat-dog world, everyone’s fate is connected. The dearth of editing made it essential that everyone hit their marks and stay on the same page.“It felt like a theater piece, or like I was playing a game of chess or Go,” Jun, the female lead, said through an interpreter. “The series is quite experimental in terms of the scenario and also the structure.”From left, Chang Ryul, Park Hyung-Soo and Jun in “Bargain.” Their characters must battle in an postapocalyptic-like environment after an earthquake collapses much of the building they are in.TVING Co/Paramount+The past few years have seen seismic change and even scandal in South Korean television and film. In 2017 the conservative president Park Geun-hye was removed from office and later convicted on charges of bribery, extortion and abusing her power, including the maintenance of a government blacklist that denied state funding to thousands of artists deemed unfriendly to her administration or insufficiently patriotic. During the Park administration, more filmmakers subsequently sought funding and distribution from streamers — especially Netflix, Hu said.Now the streaming frontier is wide open, and Paramount+ is staking its claim. Nobili, the Paramount+ executive, is particularly excited about the coming series “A Bloody Lucky Day,” about a taxi driver and a serial killer — shades of Michael Mann’s hit man/cabby movie “Collateral.”Business, in other words, is promising. But if “Bargain” stands to provide some wild entertainment for American audiences — and the promise of big revenue for its American streamer — Byun, its creator, seemed more focused on the culturally specific ways he hopes the series will speak about South Korea today. He described a country in which birthrates are plummeting and “people tend to avoid communication with others.”“They express anger about many things, claiming the value of fairness,” he continued. The characters in “Bargain,” he added, “reflect the masses in modern South Korea who seem to have lost hope, and even among them there is a rift.”And yet where there is collapse — of a building, an entertainment industry, a society — there is also the hope for renewal.“Collapse is not the end but a new beginning,” Byun said. “After going through the collapse, the characters inadvertently gain an opportunity to start over in a more primitive era where equality prevails.“I believe this also reflects the psyche of the public, desiring the end of the period they’re living in so that a new one can arise.” More