Remembered branches: Towards a future of Korean homosexual film

Korean cinema has long labored under an imported Confucian homophobia which , through its effects if not its causes, seems to mirror the Western concep tion of the closet. Recent cinematic developments in Korea, including a que er film festival in Seoul, are slowly but surely beginning to change that. Using as primary texts the recent Korean gay film Broken Branches and the l ong-forgotten lesbian film Ascetic: Woman and Woman my essay hopes to serve as a set of introductory remarks on a queer Korean cinema culture whose su rface has only just been broached.