Interview By John Esther

"Eschewing the reactionary tropes of the supernatural or working class threats to the paranoid ruling classes vis-àis mutant horror in most American movies, Bong Joon-ho's The Host (Gue-Mool) brings a social conscious to a story of a world run amok. The film commences with chemicals being dumped into a drain leading to the Han River..." John Esther spoke with director Bong Joon-ho about his newest feature The Host. An impressive buzz has built up around the film, including coverage in ArtForum.

The Host is now available on DVD.

Put them together, and the terms "East Germany" and "cinema" conjure up bleak associations: a gray Berlin, barbed wire, and the soul-frying bitterness of a Hollywood Cold War picture along the lines of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or a post-reunification lookback such as The Lives of Others. But, as Robert Horton shows in our latest primer, East German Film, there's a fair amount of barbed wire and bitterness in the films of the German Democratic Republic, but there's much more: the subject is ripe for re-discovery, a process helped along in the US by a 2005 Museum of Modern Art series and a steady stream of DVD releases from First Run Features. Click on for a report on some of the more important works from behind the Iron Curtain.