Maverick Korean Director Kim Ki-duk Reported Dead in Latvia

Award-winning and deeply divisive South Korean film director Kim Ki-duk has died of COVID-19-related complications while on a visit to Latvia, local media in Latvia has reported. His death has not been confirmed in Korea.

Latvian news portal Delfi said Kim arrived in the country a month ago with the intention of buying a house and applying for alien residency status. It added that he died in hospital. Major Korean media including Yonhap and Chosun Daily have also reported the news, citing Russian news agency TASS and Delfi.

“He was in Latvian unofficially. We at the Film institution (National Film Centre) were not informed about his personal visit to Latvia. To my information, Kim Ki-duk was planning to develop the film project in our neighbouring country, Estonia. He left Estonia some weeks ago,” Dita Rietuma, director of Latvia’s National Film Center told Variety by email.

Rietuma said unofficial information about Kim’s presence in one of Riga’s hospitals and subsequent death came from private sources. Due to European laws, the hospital will not officially comment on the case.

One executive who has worked with him in the past told Variety: “We’ve heard about Latvian and Russian reports, but we still don’t know. Seems like the Latvian government and Korean ministry of foreign affairs are checking it as well.” Korean entertainment portal Naver reported that Kim’s family has been contacted by the interpreter who was working with him in Latvia.

Kim was one of the first directors of the Korean new wave to break into international consciousness, delivering shocking but beautifully crafted dramas including “The Isle” in 2000 and “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring” in 2003. He remains the only Korean director to have won top prizes.

While they delivered a new aesthetic and collected a shelf full of festival prizes, several of his films were criticized for animal cruelty or their depiction of extreme human cruelty. In between his fine art, Kim also delivered several duds including “The Coast Guard,” “Poongsang” and “Dream.”

Despite his status overseas, Kim and the Korean film industry establishment kept each other at a distance. Kim often handled writing, directing, editing and cinematography tasks himself, allowing him to work on micro budgets and not put himself in the debt of larger firms.

That approach apparently changed in 2015 when he signed up to direct a mainland Chinese film “Who Is God” on the theme of Buddhism, partially backed by Dick Cook, a former head of Disney. With a $37 million budget, it would have cost three times the combined production budgets of all his prior movies. But with Korea and China at political loggerheads over the deployment of missiles, he was denied a work visa in August 2016.

In the last several years, Kim’s halo slipped even further. In 2017/18 he was at the center of a #MeToo scandal after an actress he had been working with filed a sexual assault case against him.

The case was partially dismissed for lack of physical evidence and he got away with a modest fine. Soon after, he traveled to the Berlin festival with one of his weakest films to date, “Human, Space, Time and Human,” and in an off-site press conference faced down the media.

But more evidence of his violence towards women surfaced later the same year when three actresses made new accusations on investigative news show “PD’s Notebook,” which was broadcast on Korean public broadcaster MBC. His career in South Korea effectively ended at that point.