Jeon Do-yeon is known as a “chameleon actress”. Throughout her 20-plus-year-long career, she played a great variety of roles that brought her the status of one of the most respected actresses in South Korean industry. In 2007, her performance in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine earned her Best Actress award at Cannes Film Festival, making her…
Category: Korean Cinema
21st Udine Far East Film Festival: The Great Battle Review
The history of Korea has been a constant struggle of forces who either conquered or tried to conquer its lands. One such turbulent event was the attack on the Ansi Fortress in 645AD, recently depicted in Kim Kwang-sik’s The Great Battle, an ultra-patriotic tale of survival and sacrifice. Photo © Next Entertainment World Emperor of the…
21st Udine Far East Film Festival: Birthday Review
In the early hours of the morning on April 16th 2014, followed by heart-wrenching days of rescue, the hearts of the South Korean nation broke as one as the ferry MV Sewol sank and claimed the lives of 304 passengers and crew members. The tragedy was made worse as 250 of the victims were juniors…
Netflix’s Kingdom Review
Where does the fascination with the undead come from? Is it the love of horror, the repellent zombies’ behaviour or the taste of adrenaline-filled adventure? Hard to say, as the zombie-loving audience varies as much as the character of zombies themselves. Zombies have been present in cinema for quite some time, but they only found…
69th Berlin Film Festival: In Conversation with Matija Strniša, a Film Music Composer
The competitive Generation 14plus section of this year’s Berlinale featured international gems with a focus on young adult themes, and the Grand Prix Award for Best Film was awarded to Kim Bora‘s House of Hummingbird, which finally got its European premiere after wowing the audience with its world premiere at the 2018 Busan International Film…
In Conversation with Steven Yeun of ‘Burning’
Steven Yeun greets me with a big smile and a warm handshake as we meet at the Mayfair hotel in London on a cold October morning. We sit down and chat about what it means to be a Korean-American, his latest production Burning, and working with Lee Chang-dong. Born in Seoul, South Korea and raised…
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning
The attempts to translate Haruki Murakami‘s prose into the cinematic language have so far mostly ended in spectacular disasters, or – in the best case – garnered mixed reviews, probably due to the specific style of the writer. But the fates have changed when Lee Chang-dong, the director of Poetry and Peppermint Candy, returned after 6 years of…
13th London Korean Film Festival: In Conversation with Kim Yang-hee and Yang Ik-june of ‘The Poet and the Boy’
The Poet and the Boy is a feature debut by Korean filmmaker Kim Yang-hee, starring Yang Ik-june, an actor and a filmmaker himself, who gained the public attention and won several awards with his semi-autobiographical feature debut, which he wrote, directed and played the leading role in – the 2009 indie hit Breathless. With her…
13th London Korean Film Festival: The Poet and the Boy Review
The Poet and the Boy (Si-e-nui a-rang) is the feature debut for Kim Yang-hee; it premiered at Jeonju International film festival in 2017, and made its way to London Korean Film Festival this fall. The film stars South Korean actor and filmmaker Yang Ik-june, who is best known for his debut film, which he both…
13th London Korean Film Festival: Microhabitat Review
Despite the complexity of portraying homelessness on screen, filmmakers keep rising to the challenge. The South Korean filmmaker Jeon Go-woon skillfully depicted the subject in her debut feature Microhabitat, in which she also questions different aspects of adult life. The film revolves around the character of Mi-so (Esom: Warriors of the Dawn, The Third Charm TV…
13th London Korean Film Festival: The Princess and the Matchmaker Review
A long wait for a premiere of a film never bodes well, even though it might be because the producers want to avoid the film clashing with the releases of other big productions, or because the progress has been slowed down by a prolonged post-production. The latter especially implies that the producer isn’t sure about…
13th London Korean Film Festival: Old Love Review
After living in Canada for many years, Yoon-hee returns to her home country of South Korea to visit her mother who has dementia. Taking a cigarette break outside Incheon airport, she runs into Jung-soo, an old college sweetheart. The pair is surprised to see each other and agrees to catch-up about the last twenty years…
In Conversation with Teo Yoo – Viktor Tsoy in Kirill Serebrennikov’s ‘Leto’
It has been almost three years since we last spoke to Teo Yoo, and looking at his fast-growing list of projects, he has kept himself very busy. Among his most recent projects that the audience was able to enjoy was his phenomenal portrayal of Viktor Tsoy (one of the Soviet rock pioneers) in Leto (Summer) by…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion Review
After the rather minor success, accompanied by mostly unfavourable critiques of his 2017 feature V.I.P, a film where mediocre imagination ruled the depictions of cruel treatment of women, which turned it into a prosaic, occasionally sickening narrative, Park Hoon-jung, who penned The Unjust (2010) and I Saw the Devil (2010), has finally made a proper…
