FAQ

It's a Korean phrase: "Dul-i meogda hanaga jug-eodo moleunda." (Two men eat, one man dies, I don't known") - basically saying that this food is so good that if your dining partner died you wouldn't notice.

To the contrary, film preservation efforts have failed to save a number of early South Korean films, and HANYO stands to suffer this same fate. The resurgence of South Korean cinema has mostly concenrated on relatively recent works.

The San Francisco Film Society assembled a full print in 1999 - the year its director Kim Ki-Young passed away. Since then, the print has been playing at film festivals throughout the world. The festival circuit is currently your best option for seeing the film as it was intended.

Update (May 2009): This film has been restored by Korean Film Archive with the support from World Cinema Foundation. It is currently available for viewing freely on-line at www.theauteurs.com

HANYO has been released on Korean VHS in several small releases, varying in completeness and video quality. There was mimimal English subtitling on these editions, of course.

Hanyo was released on DVD, in South Korea, in the summer of 2009, as part of the Korean Film Archive Collection.

The Housemaid is also available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection as a part of their first volume of Martin Scorcese's World Cinema Project box-set. An individual Blu-ray was released by a different company, KOFA, in South Korea.