Tony Rayns, British critic who championed Korean cinema abroad, dies at 78

Tony Rayns, the British film critic who spent four decades bringing Korean and other Asian cinema to audiences abroad, died. He was 78.

News of his death reached Asian film circles on Wednesday morning. The cause has not been officially confirmed.

Screen Daily reported Wednesday that Rayns died at his home in London earlier this month, citing people close to him as its source. 

He had fought pancreatic cancer for years but had recovered, and visited a Hong Kong film festival earlier this year.

Rayns was among the first generation of foreign critics to champion Korean film internationally. Born in London in 1948, he studied film through a school club and on his own. From the 1970s, he wrote for magazines including the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound, Cinema Scope and Film Comment, and made his name as a specialist in Asian cinema.

From 1988 to 2006, he ran the Dragons and Tigers competition for Asian films at the Vancouver International Film Festival. He championed Hong Kong cinema in its 1980s heyday, along with a new wave of Asian talent: China's Fifth Generation directors, such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige; Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien; and Japan's Takeshi Kitano.

His ties to Korean film began at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival, where he was struck by Korean shorts that had slipped past the government's censors to screen in the Forum section.

He visited Korea the same year and began working with its filmmakers. He went on to introduce a new generation of Korean directors — Jang Sun-woo, Hong Sang-soo and Lee Chang-dong — to Western critics. He steeped himself in modern Korean history, from Japanese colonial rule through the Korean War and the military dictatorships, and brought unusual depth to his criticism.

He was especially close to Bong Joon-ho. Rayns arranged the international festival debut of Bong's graduation short from the Korean Academy of Film Arts, “Incoherence,” which he showed at the Hong Kong and Vancouver festivals in 1994, and later promoted “Memories of Murder” (2003) and “The Host” (2006) abroad. He also handled English subtitle translations for many Korean, Japanese and Hong Kong films.

Rayns helped launch the Busan International Film Festival in 1996. Drawing on his friendship with the festival's founding director, Kim Dong-ho, he served as an adviser and juror and returned to the city almost every year until recently. When the festival faced a crisis in 2014 over its screening of the documentary “The Diving Bell,” he publicly condemned the suppression of free expression.

Rayns directed “The Jang Sun-Woo Variations” (2001), a documentary on the director Jang Sun-woo, and wrote widely on East Asian filmmakers such as Wong Kar-wai and Kenji Mizoguchi. He cowrote “Away with Words” (1999), the directorial film of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and appeared in “Jury” (2013), a short directed by Kim. His devotion to East Asian film was also captured in “Tony Rayns and 25 Years of Korean Cinema,” a documentary screened at Busan in 2012.

He received the Korean Cinema Award at Busan in 1996. In Japan, he won the Kawakita Prize in 2004 and a commendation from Japan's Foreign Ministry in 2008 for promoting East Asian film. In 2023, the Korean Film Council published his English-language book “Just Like Starting Over,” which gathered his critical writing on Korean cinema.

“He was a close friend, and I am deeply saddened by his passing,” Director Kim told the JoongAng Ilbo. “He made a great contribution to introducing Korean film abroad and to its development.”

“In the 1980s, when Korean cinema was cut off from the world, filmmakers opened their eyes to international trends through Tony Rayns,” said Park Ki-yong, a director and former head of the Korean Film Council who produced “The Jang Sun-Woo Variations.”

“He loved Korean and Asian film more than anyone, and supported it sincerely.”

BY NA WON-JEONG [[email protected]]