CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Frances Gateward, a professor in the African American Studies and Research Program, the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and the Unit for Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded an overseas research grant from the Korean Film Council in Seoul, South Korea.
Her winning project is titled "A Critical Filmography of World Cinema - Korea." Gateward's proposal was one of only three to be selected in the international competition.
The volume she produces as a result of her research grant will be her second book-length project on the national cinema of Korea. Her anthology "Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema" is forthcoming from SUNY Press.
The Critical Filmographies of World Cinema series recounts national film histories through the various countries' films themselves. The initial volumes will be devoted to the film histories of China, Cuba, Hungary, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and the Czech and Slovak republics. The series is being published by caboose, a small Canadian publisher in Montreal that is devoted to books about film.
The Korean Film Council was founded in 1973 as a government-supported body to improve the quality of Korean films and to promote the Korean film industry.