I had a nice little surprise today when I went browsing through Kyobo Books downtown — I discovered a new volume of THE PAST UNEARTHED, the Korean Film Archive’s collection of colonial era Korean films.


If you recall, I wrote about the first box set of colonial era films here. This set has three films in it — SWEET DREAM (1936), MILITARY TRAIN (1938) and FISHERMAN’S FIRE (1939). Sadly, I have not had time to watch them yet, but I hope to write about them fairly soon.

SWEET DREAM in particular looks interesting, as it is the oldest surviving Korean film (at least that we know of). The set also has a few bits of pieces from other films that have survived.

As usual, the packaging is superb (except perhaps for being too tight… hard to get the booklet and DVDs out the first time). Most interesting to me was the inner DVD box, which had a reproduction of a newspaper page from the colonial era.

You can buy your own copy of THE PAST UNEARTHED from Kyobo Books. You can even order it online.