South Korean filmmaker Kim Mi-jo has never been particularly interested in making life easier for her characters, especially when their experiences raise uncomfortable questions about injustice, family relationships and the ways people respond to suffering. Her first feature, Gull (2020), followed an older woman who, after being sexually assaulted, finds herself fighting not only for justice but also to be heard by the people around her. The film won the Grand Prize in the Korean Competition at the 21st Jeonju International Film Festival.
Kim studied at Dankook University’s Graduate School of Cinematic Content and began directing short films, including Tongue (2017) and The Disgusting Family (2019), before making Gull. Her second feature, The Journey to Gyeong-ju, brings her back to the London Korean Film Festival, where Gull previously screened in the Women’s Voices programme in 2020. This time, Kim’s film has been selected to open the festival’s 21st edition, receiving its UK premiere at BFI Southbank on 2 November 2026, followed by a Q&A with the director and leading actress Lee Jung-eun.
Starring Lee Jung-eun alongside Gong Hyo-jin, Park So-dam and Lee Yeon, The Journey to Gyeong-ju follows a mother and her three surviving daughters as they set out to confront the man responsible for the murder of the youngest member of their family eight years earlier.
Ahead of the London Korean Film Festival, I had the opportunity to speak exclusively with Kim Mi-jo for View of the Arts about the ideas behind The Journey to Gyeong-ju, why she chose to tell such a painful story through a road trip filled with unexpected comedy, and how she worked with Lee Jung-eun, Gong Hyo-jin and the rest of the cast to develop the four women at its centre. We also discussed the different ways families experience grief, the difficulties of finding the right balance between humour and tragedy, and her reservations about the emotional satisfaction that revenge films so often promise their audiences.
View of the Arts: The starting point of “The Journey to Gyeong-ju” is an extremely painful one, yet the film also has a surprising sense of absurdity and dark humour. What made you want to tell this story through such an unexpected combination of tones?
Kim Mi-jo: I don’t think tragedy and comedy are necessarily opposing emotions. In fact, I believe they exist quite naturally alongside each other in our everyday lives. Even someone who has experienced a terrible tragedy doesn’t spend every moment feeling sad. People who have lost someone still have to eat, sleep and sometimes argue with their families over the smallest things; to me, those ordinary moments are a very real part of being alive.
In The Journey to Gyeong-ju, the mother and her three daughters set off with the very serious intention of taking revenge, but along the way they repeatedly find themselves in situations they never expected. I found something very human about people who have decided to kill someone but then become completely flustered when faced with the most trivial problems. I didn’t actually set out to make a black comedy. I think my own way of looking at the world naturally found its way into the film, because even in the most serious circumstances, I tend to notice the irony and absurdity hidden within them.
Above all, I wanted the humour to show how real and alive these characters are, rather than make light of their suffering. Being able to laugh in the middle of tragedy doesn’t mean the sadness has disappeared; it simply means that, despite everything, life goes on.
VOA: The road trip gives the story a sense of movement, but emotionally, the family seems to be carrying something that cannot simply be left behind. Why did you choose a journey as the framework for exploring their grief and desire for revenge?
Kim Mi-jo: I see The Journey to Gyeong-ju as a story about a family setting out to seek revenge, but also about a family whose lives, in some ways, have been standing still for a very long time and are finally beginning to move again.
After the youngest daughter, Gyeong-ju, died, the family members would have continued with their individual lives, but I imagine that a part of them remained trapped in that day eight years earlier. I think this was especially true for the mother, Ok-sil, who finally begins to take action when she decides to pursue revenge. That’s why I felt the road movie format suited the family’s emotional journey so well; they are travelling towards a very specific destination, with revenge as their purpose, but what they actually encounter along the way are the wounds and feelings they have spent years avoiding.
The city of Gyeongju itself was also very important to me; it is one of Korea’s best-known tourist destinations, but it is also a place where countless ancient tombs form a natural part of the everyday landscape. When I visited, I was struck by how closely life and death seemed to exist together, and I felt that this reflected the family, who have continued living while carrying the death of someone they loved. In that sense, Gyeongju is much more than their destination; the city plays an important part in establishing the film’s emotional character. We often assume that being a family means knowing each other well, but sometimes we don’t even understand the suffering of those closest to us. Although these four women experienced the same tragedy, I don’t think they truly knew what each of them had been feeling over the previous eight years.
By spending so much time together in a confined car, constantly disagreeing and confronting one another, they gradually begin to see who the others really are. In the end, what matters most isn’t whether they reach their destination, but what happens between them on the way there. They may have started this journey to take revenge, but perhaps what they really needed was time to grieve together, argue with one another and begin to understand each other.
VOA: Ok-sil and her daughters have suffered the same loss, but that does not necessarily mean they grieve in the same way. How important was it for you to show the differences in their responses, rather than presenting them as a family united by a single emotion?
Kim Mi-jo: This was one of the most important things I thought about while making the film. I find family relationships incredibly contradictory because, although our relatives are often the people closest to us, they can also be the people we misunderstand the most. From the beginning of the writing process, I had this idea that family members can be both our strongest allies and our greatest opponents.
The four women in The Journey to Gyeong-ju have lost the same person, but that loss means something different to each of them. To Ok-sil, Gyeong-ju was her daughter, whereas to Jang-ju, Yeong-ju and Dong-ju, she was their sister. They all loved her, but their relationships with her were different, so naturally their grief would be different too.
At first, I wanted the family to appear almost like a single unit. They wear matching clothes, travel in the same car and move towards the same goal, almost like a small army. But as the story progresses, that seemingly strong sense of unity begins to crack, and their individual wounds and desires gradually come to the surface. I wanted the audience to see them first as one family and then, little by little, as four separate people. Loving someone doesn’t automatically mean we understand their pain. Sometimes, precisely because we love them, we expect them to grieve in the same way we do, or we unintentionally impose our own feelings upon them. That’s why I didn’t want reconciliation in this film to mean that everyone eventually arrives at the same emotional conclusion. What mattered more to me was their ability to recognise that their grief is different and to discover that they can still continue living together despite those differences.
VOA: Revenge films often give audiences a clear villain and the satisfaction of seeing justice delivered. Your film seems less interested in offering such straightforward answers. Were you deliberately questioning the emotional satisfaction that revenge stories usually promise?
Kim Mi-jo: I didn’t want to dismiss the desire for revenge itself. I think wanting revenge is an entirely human response when someone has suffered an irreversible wrong, particularly when the law and the institutions meant to protect people have failed to address the victim’s suffering. In those circumstances, I often wondered who could really feel entitled to condemn someone’s anger.
While preparing the film, I read many accounts from families who had lost loved ones to violent crime, and one of my greatest concerns was making sure their suffering wasn’t simply used to provide entertainment or emotional satisfaction for an audience. In a typical revenge film, the moment the perpetrator is punished often gives the audience a feeling of satisfaction, and that becomes the resolution of the story. But I kept questioning whether that moment could really take away the pain of those who had suffered. Punishing the person responsible doesn’t bring the dead back, nor does it suddenly return the lives of the surviving family members to what they were before.
At the same time, I didn’t want to suggest that giving up revenge or choosing forgiveness was necessarily the right thing to do. For me, the central question wasn’t whether the characters should take revenge or forgive the perpetrator. I was more interested in how far people might go in trying to deal with their grief and what they might discover when they finally reach that point. That’s also why I wanted Ok-sil to remain determined and continue making her own decisions. I didn’t want her to be someone who simply sat in her sadness waiting for another person to comfort her.
When audiences finish watching the film, I hope they won’t remember only how severely the perpetrator was punished. I’d much rather they think about how this family will continue living afterwards and what kind of relationship these women will have with one another.
VOA: The film’s visual style and its unusual family dynamic sometimes bring a sense of comedy to scenes that could easily have been portrayed as tragic. How did you decide when humour could reveal something important about the characters and when it might undermine the seriousness of their experiences?
Kim Mi-jo: I think the most important question is where the humour comes from. The characters’ suffering itself should never become something we laugh at, but there can certainly be humour in the situations people find themselves in or in the ways they respond to those situations.
The four women in The Journey to Gyeong-ju have an extremely serious purpose, but they’re not professional criminals. They’re ordinary people who, even when attempting something as extraordinary as revenge, continue behaving in very ordinary ways. It was that difference between their intentions and their behaviour that interested me. Because tragedy and comedy are constantly crossing paths throughout the film, finding the right balance was particularly important.
Sometimes, a scene I had imagined while writing the screenplay would take on a completely different quality once the actors performed it. During filming, I therefore asked them to try scenes in several different ways, ranging from slightly exaggerated performances to much more restrained, realistic interpretations, so that we would have options when it came to editing. We continued making those adjustments during post-production. Emotions can be difficult to describe precisely, so when discussing scenes with the crew, including the music director, I would sometimes use very specific proportions, such as saying that a scene should feel 70 per cent tragic and 30 per cent comic. That was how carefully we tried to maintain the film’s particular balance.
But ultimately, it wasn’t about dividing sadness and humour according to a formula. It was about remaining faithful to what the characters were feeling. Sometimes laughter can make sadness even more apparent, and if audiences find themselves laughing at this family one moment and feeling heartbroken for them the next, then I think we’ve come close to achieving what I wanted.
VOA: What did you discover about the story while working with Lee Jung-eun and the rest of the cast that you had not necessarily anticipated when writing the screenplay? Did any of their interpretations change your understanding of the characters?
Kim Mi-jo: Even now, when I think about the actors who appeared in this film, I feel incredibly grateful. When I first wrote the screenplay, I never imagined that such wonderful performers would all come together for this project. In the earliest version of the script, the story revolved mainly around the mother, Ok-sil, while the three daughters were relatively passive characters who observed what their mother was doing. But as I continued developing the screenplay, I realised that each daughter needed her own story and emotional life. Once the actors joined the production, those characters began to feel much more like real, fully developed people.
One experience I remember particularly well was working with Gong Hyo-jin on the character of Jang-ju, the eldest daughter. Originally, I had imagined Jang-ju as a much more domineering person, someone who tried to control the family because she was the eldest and who strongly insisted that everyone follow her decisions. But after discussing the character with Gong Hyo-jin, I began to think that Jang-ju didn’t necessarily need to behave in such an authoritarian way. Perhaps she would be more interesting if, despite being frustrated by her mother and sisters, she also tried to understand and accept them in her own way. So Gong Hyo-jin and I gradually worked together to adjust Jang-ju’s personality and behaviour.
As the eldest daughter, Jang-ju has spent much of her life carrying responsibilities within the family, but she is also someone with her own desires and ambitions. I think Gong Hyo-jin portrayed those complicated feelings with remarkable naturalness.
Working with such talented actors reminded me that a character isn’t completed solely through the director’s imagination. Actors bring their own experiences and interpretations to a role, and sometimes they reveal aspects of a character that I hadn’t even considered.
In that sense, although The Journey to Gyeong-ju is a story I wrote, it is also a story that we discovered and developed together throughout the filmmaking process.
Written and interviewed by Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of Lotte Entertainment
View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.
