In Netflix’s new K-drama Aema, a world-weary top actress, the misogynistic head of a film studio, an anxious first-time director, and an ambitious nightclub tapdancer come together to make the country’s first adult film.
While some of the specific characters and interpersonal scenarios in Aema may be fictional, the Korean period drama is based on real-life Korean history. The six-episode series draws direct inspiration from the creation of an actual erotic film, released in Korea in 1982: Madame Aema.
In the process of telling a fictionalized version of this production, Aema also depicts some of the distinct and brutal social conditions that came during Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship, as Korea set its sights on both continuing its rapid economic ascent and “modernizing” in the leadup to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Let’s discuss some of the real-life history that informs the comedy and drama of Aema…
What is Aema about?
As a period drama, Aema chronicles a fictionalized version of the real-life production of Madame Aema. All of the characters depicted in the film are fictional. Lee Ha-nee (also known as Honey Lee to many international fans) stars as Jeong Hee-ran, a veteran Korean actress known for nudity in her film roles.
Hee-ran is the darling of the Korean film industry, and she is sick of having to play the same flavor of empty, overly-sexualized roles. When she gets a script for Madame Aema, the final project she has to complete before she is free of her contract with the fictional Shinsung Pictures, she decides to take a stand. She announces to the press she will only be doing nudity-free roles moving forward.
Greedy studio head Ku Jung-ho (Uprising’s Jin Sun-kyu) is furious. He decides to cast an unknown in the title role, and to banish Hee-ran to supporting actress duty. Enter Shin Ju-ae (newcomer Bang Hyo-rin), an aspiring actress who is willing to bare her breasts to secure a stable future. When she charms rookie director Kwak In-u (D.P.’s Cho Hyun-chul) with a tapdance, she nabs the role.
Ju-ae idolized Hee-ran, but Hee-ran sees the wannabe starlet as a threat. Hee-ran tries to scare Ju-ae away, but eventually comes to see the young woman as an ally in the fight against a male-run, misogynistic film industry and society.
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Chungmuro: Korea’s historic Hollywood
Much of the action in Aema takes place along Chungmuro, a long street in central Seoul where Korea’s film industry was historically situated. The neighborhood was home to film agencies and movie theaters, including one of Korea’s oldest cinemas, Dansungsa. In Aema, Chungmuroi is where Shinsung Pictures is based.
Film agencies began to move out of Chungmuro to other neighborhoods, often Gangnam on the other side of the Han River, in the 1990s, with the transition to democracy and the birth of the Korean New Wave. While the business center of the industry resides elsewhere now, Chungmuro remains a metonym for the nation’s cinema. Today, the country’s top film actors, like Song Kang-ho or Lee Byung-hyun, might be referred to as “Chungmuro actors” if they have reached a certain level of sustained domestic prestige.
Film censorship during Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship
As in the production process depicted in the series, Madame Aema was subject to the whims of President Chun Doo-hwan’s censorship committee, which was more interested in controlling anti-government sentiment than prohibiting profitable depictions of sex. In fact, Chun was all for the latter. Chun was Korea’s military dictator from 1980 to 1987. In an effort to distract the public from his authoritarian regime’s violence and oppression, he launched the so-called “3S” policy (sex, screen, and sports) mentioned in Aema, ushering in an era of erotic film in Korea.
Chun rose to power following the 1979 assassination of President Park Chung Hee. One of his first acts as president was to violently suppress the pro-democracy, student-led demonstrations that rose up in response to the coup. The most brutal of these suppressions took place in the city of Gwangju, where more than 200 people were killed by the military. The event is known as the Gwangju Massacre.
While Aema leans into the bright, bold energy of the early 1980s film industry, the series hints at and sometimes explicitly depicts the authoritarian terror of the era. In one of the most heated discussions between Hee-ran and Ku, Hee-ran berates Ku for sending Ju-ae to sleep with government officials in exchange for the greenlighting of the Madame Aema script. “As if anyone has the guts to refuse what they ask,” yells Ku. “As if anyone in the Republic of Korea has the damn power to protect anything! This is a country where you can be dragged off and found dead by morning!”
Chun’s government used 3S, including the greenlighting of Korea’s first adult films, as an unsuccessful attempt to distract the populace from this kind of violence and suppression. “In the early 1980s, erotic films were actively encouraged and produced as a matter of policy,” Aema director Lee Hae-young said during a press conference for the show. “Ironically, there was also strict censorship and rampant cuts, meaning there was virtually no freedom of expression. By revisiting this irony from today’s perspective, I thought I could reinterpret it in 2025 and explore its meaning in a way that delivers a new message.”
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The real Madame Aema and Korea’s 1980s “ero” film era
Madame Aema was the first erotic film to be made after the implementation of the “3S Act,” and was considered to be the most sexually explicit film to have been made in Korea, up until that point. It starred Ahn So-young as Oh Su-bi, a lustful woman who takes on multiple lovers while her husband is away. In the movie’s most famous scene, Madame Aema rides a horse, nude, until she reaches climax. The film was a big success, going on to spawn 12 direct sequels and a further 16 spin-offs and reboots, and encouraging a wave of erotic film. Madame Aema was one of only two films to sell over 100,000 tickets in Seoul in 1982.
The film’s title was inspired by 1974 softcorn pornographic French film Emmanuelle, and was part of a larger trend in Europe and Japan of mainstream adult filmmaking. In Korea, these movies were known as “ero” films, after the Japanese term. Some of the moments that Aema pulls from real-life history include the censorship of the film’s title. In real-life and in the world of the film, the production was forced to change the hanja used in the title from the characters meaning “horse-loving woman” to the characters meaning “hemp-loving woman.”
Another real-life movie depicted in the world of Aema is Yeong-ja’s Heydays, a 1975 film starring Yeom Bok-sun. The film is an example of the “hostess” genre, or stories about prostitutes or bargirls, popular in Korea during the 1970s. “Hostess films” are mentioned in Aema, and it is implied that Hee-ran has made her career starring in them.
We see a poster for Yeong-ja’s Heydays on the wall of the room Ju-ae is sharing with other working class women at the beginning of Aema. In the K-drama’s fictionalized universe, Hee-ran starred in the film. This moment exemplifies Aema’s’ larger philosophy toward real-life history as grounded in historical detail but as secondary to the series’ fictional characters and contemporary thematic interests.
Is Aema based on a true story?
While Aema is directly inspired by the real-life history of Korean cinema, it is not a documentary or straight historical fiction. “Since the story is set in the 1980s, my starting point was to stay as historically accurate as possible but without being confined by it,” said Lee during the press conference, as reported by The Korea Herald.
With Aema, Lee is using this specific, well-known moment in Korean film history to tell a story about the growing pains of a changing Korea. “[Madame] Aema was an icon that embodied the desires of the times and the desires of the masses in the 1980s,” said Lee. “But to have lived through that era as Aema meant constantly confronting and enduring deep prejudices and violent misunderstandings. That’s why, when I conceived this story, I thought of it as a way to support and give voice to the endurance of those who lived as Aema during that era.”
“The more dazzling and glittering the sights and sounds,” continued Lee, “the more I wanted them to expose how that so-called era of barbarism flaunted extravagance while feeding on exploitation and oppression. That spirit is what shaped Aema.” In Lee’s intentions, it’s not hard to see how the themes explored in Aema might have relevance to today’s audiences, consuming media in a Korea and broader world still defined by power inequalities that lead to an unjust or even frightening status quo.
“Right now, we’re telling a story set in the 1980s with Aema, but if you look closely at the details, you’ll find that it connects to and resembles the world we live in today,” said Lee. “I feel like people similar to Joong-ho still exist, at least within the film industry,” he said. “[They are] people who think, ‘As long as the business succeeds, it doesn’t matter what the process was — everything is forgiven.’”
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