Up amongst Seoul’s rollercoaster of a skyline, Yong-nam (Jo Jung-suk) and Eui-Ju (Lim Yoona) are hurdling from building to building desperately trying to outrun and outsmart the toxic fog slowly following them across the city. Opening up this year’s London East Asia Film Festival, Lee Sang-geun’s feature debut Exit is a joyful, lively but somewhat…
Author: View of the Arts
View of the Arts is run by female arts journalists and works with a diverse team of writers and film critics.
In Conversation with Aivan, Singer-Songwriter and Multi-Instrumentalist
“I don’t remember a specific day where I just woke up thinking I’d become an artist” Lee Johan, a.k.a Aivan, explains over an iced tea in one of Seoul’s busy cafes. Aivan only debuted last year, but he has already written a hefty amount of music in that time. It might not have been a…
63rd BFI London Film Festival: Moffie Review
Tucked up in their dorm beds, sandwiched between lumpy mattresses and itchy blankets, South African soldiers are swapping stories. One of them starts to tell the story of two soldiers found kissing in a bathroom stall – ‘Moffies’ they’re derogatorily named. After being caught the pair are dragged out and thrown in front of their…
2019 Zandari Festa in Seoul – Dead Buttons
Like all great adventures, the Dead Buttons gig at Zandari Festa ended too soon. Deep in the belly of Seoul’s Club FF surrounded by layers of graffiti and stickers on neon washed walls, a small stage held Dead Buttons and all their energy, all their sound, all their passion. As the venue filled and the…
63rd BFI London Film Festival: The Last Black Man in San Francisco Review
Balancing together on the same beat-up skateboard, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) and his best friend Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) fly through the streets of San Francisco. A symphony of soaring strings and thunderous, belting horns explodes behind them – over the top of which, a soapbox preacher urges that ‘We are these homes! We built them!… This…
63rd BFI London Film Festival: The Dude in Me Review
Body swap comedies are beloved for their bold and ludicrous takes on what happens when opposites switch. Defined by the occurrence of two characters swapping physical states but maintaining their prior personalities, body swap films offer up absurd and fanciful interpretations of what can happen when you take characters and place them in an extreme…
Sesang Review
Sesang – translated as the Korean word for ‘world’ – follows the lives of two twenty-something creatives Nari (Kim Jin-young) and Han-chul (Han Jong-hoon) as they try to navigate their own separate careers after falling out of love. The former lovers reunite after a year apart when Han-chul visits Nari in New York, where Nari…
“We Wanted to Be a Voice for the Silent, a Light in the Dark, and Spread Hope to the Hopeless” – In Conversation with FYKE
The world has never been an easy place to live in and nowadays, more and more people struggle to endure, with the younger generation often feeling helpless and lost. Still; no matter how hard it might get, there is always a bright side to life – and for some, music is the answer; a ‘helping…
Dok2 Brings Blistering Energy to His London Show
The hip-hop subculture has been a part of the backyard culture or the street culture, as some may call it, for over 40 years now. Initially created in the ghettos of New York as a means of expression mostly for the black communities in the USA, hip-hop caught on and spread like wildfire around the…
76th Venice International Film Festival: Lingua Franca Review
As the Trump reign rages on, the illegal immigrants are solidly placed among the most marginalized and prosecuted groups in the USA, even though the government’s zero-tolerance policy hasn’t quite quenched the numbers of those seeking a brighter future in what used to be seen as the land of the free. In 2017, the estimate…
76th Venice International Film Festival: Chola (Shadow of Water) Review
Chola is an uncompromising and uncomfortable film that attempts to tackle the alarming sexually oppressed female experience of modern India. Yet, while writer/director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan pretties and dresses up the journey with wide, ambitiously beautiful shots of rural Kerala, the destination is left jarringly raw and brutally morbid. What starts as a charmingly simple…
76th Venice International Film Festival: Atlantis Review
The year is 2025 – just one year after a war has ended between Ukraine and Russia. A war that has left eastern Ukraine collapsing into a state of disrepair. Hundreds of flooded mines have left local wells and rivers poisoned beyond repair, in a few years this region will be void of any drinking…
76th Venice International Film Festival: Just 6.5 Metri Shisho Nim Review
For over a decade, Iran has been witnessing a rise in the number of drug addicts; drug abuse, which is often concentrated on the use of opium and its derivative substances, has risen double in the country since 2017 and even with strict laws and punishments, it seems like there is still no successful solution…
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite Review
Seeing Bong Joon-ho’s work makes one believe time and again that the art of film excellence has not yet disappeared. South Korean director, known for The Host, Okja and Snowpiercer, gifted the film goers with yet another sublime production of his this year: Parasite; a perverse, comical, contemporary yet daunting film that won the Palme…
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