We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

In South Korea, which is a much less conservative environment, politicians do not take their wives around with them as much as their American counterparts do. Showing pride in your wife is thought of as juvenile bad form. There's a special pejorative for people who do it.

[T]hose who haven’t yet grasped the ideological realities of the [Korean] peninsula probably never will.

[R]ace theory is at variance with all Korean traditions; not for nothing did the national language lack a word for race until modern times.

You [South Korean women] should be ashamed of yourselves. Why are you making such a fuss about menstruating when the nation’s birthrate is the lowest in the world?

South Korea, not very tolerant, is an outlier. Although the country is rich, well-educated, peaceful and ethnically homogenous – all trends that appear to coincide with racial tolerance – more than one in three South Koreans said they do not want a neighbor of a different race. This may have to do with Korea's particular view of its own racial-national identity as unique – studied by scholars such as B.R. Myers – and with the influx of Southeast Asian neighbors and the nation's long-held tensions with Japan.

Big question! When my film was released in the autumn, there was a huge discourse regarding feminism in Korea, and thanks to that, there were a lot of discussions connecting my film and the issue of feminism; I felt really thankful about that. Now, the #MeToo movement in Korea… It means that many people in Korea are going through a hard time now, not just the victims and the offenders, but also people who were there when it happened. But, I think this is a time that we have to go through; of course, it is very painful, but we need to go through the pain in order to heal. Also, in the film industry, there are a lot of trials and movements to make the situation better. There are discussions about sexual equality not only in the film industry, but also in the world of theatre, and in other cultural professions. It’s very hard and painful right now, but it is a period of time that we need.

South Korea has its most pacifist administration ever... [P]eople here [in South Korea] do not identify strongly with their state. No public holiday celebrates it, neither the flag nor the coat of arms nor the anthem conveys republican or non-ethnic values, no statues of presidents stand in major cities. Few people can even tell you the year in which the state was founded. When the average [South Korean] man sees the [South Korean] flag, he feels fraternity with [ethnic] Koreans around the world.

Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.

In divided Germany you had liberal democracy versus communism. In divided Korea it’s moderate versus radical Korean nationalism, a difference of degree inside one big ideological community. It’s a huge difference, of course, but moderates always feel a certain admiration for radicals in all ideologies and religions. This admiration has been reflected in movies here that show North Korean women as purer, more chaste, and North Korean men as more resolute, handsome, and cooler than their South Korean counterparts. This year we have seen North Korean defectors appear in films as criminals or even murderers, which is in line with how the local press has long treated defectors as bad elements.

Foreign traders were being restricted to certain parts of the peninsula well before the Korean people learned from the Japanese how to look at the world in racial categories. This makes it harder to figure out whether discrimination against foreigners in South Korea has more to do with xenophobia or nationalism. There still seems to be, as in Japan, a common sense of a certain racial hierarchy, with Koreans and perhaps the Japanese too at the top. But it's a moral hierarchy without much serious conviction of intellectual, let alone physical superiority. For all the loud professions of hostility towards Japan, the Japanese are considered the least foreign of foreign races.

The oppressive measures on pornography by the South Korean government are totally insane... It is actually seen that it oppresses masculinity and that it distorts the essentials. It is all done by the Ministry of Gender Equality and women’s organizations led by Korean feminists.

Women are not encouraged in our culture to be vocal or to be politically active. Also, some men are not ready for the era of women in power

In our society, we don’t talk about gender, at all. I don’t understand how you fix a problem if you can’t acknowledge you have one.