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…
Category: Foreign Films
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…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: Miss Baek Review
Child abuse is a serious problem in South Korea, where the Western trend of permissive education and upbringing never made an entirely successful landing, and where (light) corporal punishment will still hardly draw the attention of authorities, which has lead to horrific numbers of child abuse cases that have been growing at an alarming rate….
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: In Conversation with Han Ji-min of ‘Miss Baek’
Han Ji-min is a South Korean actress who first gained mainstream attention with her performance in 2005 Korean TV series Ressurection. She continued a successful TV career, starring in some of the K-drama world favourites – Yi San, Padam Padam, Rooftop Prince, and Hyde Jekyll, Me. At the same time, she started building a successful…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: Shoplifters Review
A gentle and emotionally intelligent look at the meaning of family in contemporary Japan. Empathetic, quiet and in-tune with human fragility, this year’s Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters explores the humane need for belonging and connection. Wondering if you can ‘choose’ your family, Hirokazu Koreeda once again perfects the art of drawing genuine heartbreak from an…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: Tropical Fish Review
Chen Yu-Hsun dishes up a lively and lovable comedy-drama with this New Taiwanese Cinema classic. Originally released in 1995, Tropical Fish encapsulates an authentic and personal look at Taiwanese approaches to family-living and the nation’s harsh school system. Mocking how concerned families are with school exams and how ludicrous the studying regime for adolescents can…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: In Conversation with Kim Yoon-seok of ‘Dark Figure of Crime’
Kim Yoon-seok is a renowned South Korean actor with an extensive filmography and even a few TV-series (K-dramas) under his belt, even though he initially debuted in 1988 as a theatre actor, in the role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, originally portrayed by Marlon Brando on Broadway. It is impossible not to…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: In Conversation with Kim Tae-gyoon, Director of ‘Dark Figure of Crime’
For a long period of time, Kim Tae-gyoon worked as an assistant director to Kwak Kyung-taek, the director of The Classified File, Friend: The Great Legacy and Eye for an Eye. Over the years, their friendship grew. Kwak Kyung-taek became Kim Tae-gyoon’s mentor, teacher and a friend. While working on the story of Dark Figure of…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: Dark Figure of Crime Review
Why are there so many unsolved/ghost murder cases out there in the world? Experts might work on as many as they can take on, yet they still cannot solve the crimes that go unnoticed. To the victims’ families, the agony of not knowing what happened to their loved ones is beyond one’s comprehension. But how do…
3rd London East Asia Film Festival: 1987 – When The Day Comes Review
When in 1987, Park Jong-chul, a 21-year-old activist and a student of Linguistics at Seoul National University, died while being questioned by the Anti-Communist Investigations Bureau about whereabouts of the campus leader and the fellow ‘revolutionist’, no one expected that the South Korean political landscape was about to change forever. The authorities insisted that the young…
23rd Busan International Film Festival: In Conversation with Martin Turk, Director of ‘Good Day’s Work’
Martin Turk is a Slovenian-Italian filmmaker, a graduate of University of Ljubljana’s Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT), now based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He created several award-winning short films that were screened at film festivals across the globe; his most notable creations include his short film Every Day Is Not the Same (2008),…
23rd Busan International Film Festival: Good Day’s Work Review
Sarajevo City of Film for Global Screen (SCF GS) is an initiative by Sarajevo Film Festival and Turkish Radio and Televison, aimed at financing small projects from the countries in the Balkans. The first tender was won by the script for Good Day’s Work, written by Slovenian-Italian filmmaker Martin Turk, but winning the tender had…
23rd Busan Internationational Film Festival: House of Hummingbird Review
Hummingbirds are the smallest of birds, with their tiny wings flapping away even faster than their heartbeats, unless they experience torpor, a hibernation-like state that hummingbirds use to protect themselves from the cold. Even though they are tiny, they build nests that have been named among the most exquisite wonders of nature. Much like hummingbirds, there…
23rd Busan International Film Festival: Come On Irene Review
Hideki Arai’s 1990s manga series Come on Irene (Itoshi no Irene) addressed the shortage of brides in the rural areas of Japan, melding comedy, drama and darker thriller hues into its story – there is no wonder that it attracted Keisuke Yoshida, a Japanese filmmaker whose previous projects successfully combined those same elements. In fact,…
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