In Park Hoon-jung‘s films, power rarely changes hands peacefully, and those who have spent their lives serving powerful men often discover that loyalty gives little protection when everything begins to fall apart. His latest crime thriller, Tristes Tropiques (슬픈 열대, 2025), returns to the violent criminal world that has become familiar territory for the South…
Tag: film festival
21st London Korean Film Festival: “The Accordion Door” (2025) Review
Childhood is often described as a time of discovery, when young people are encouraged to develop their interests and gradually understand what they might want from life, although the reality can be considerably less forgiving for children who grow up believing that their achievements determine how others see them. In his feature directorial debut, The…
21st London Korean Film Festival: In Conversation with Kim Mi-jo, Director of “The Journey to Gyeong-ju” – Exclusive Interview
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…
21st London Korean Film Festival: Lee Jung-eun on Grief, Motherhood and the Difficult Questions Behind “The Journey to Gyeong-ju” – Exclusive Interview
Lee Jung-eun has been acting for more than thirty years, spending much of that time in theatre and taking on smaller screen roles before finally receiving the wider recognition her performances had long deserved. Since her stage debut in 1991, she has built an impressive career in Korean film and television; her performance in Parasite…
21st London Korean Film Festival: “The Journey to Gyeong-ju” Review
For those who have lost someone to a violent crime, the passage of time does not necessarily bring the consolation that others so readily expect, especially when the person responsible has completed their sentence and returned to ordinary life, while the bereaved are left to contend with consequences that no legal judgement can undo. In…
21st London Korean Film Festival: In Conversation With Yoon Ga-eun (Director) and Jang Hye-jin (Actress) of “The World of Love”
From Guest (2011) and Sprout (2013) to The World of Us and The House of Us, Yoon Ga-eun’s films have consistently returned to childhood as a space of emotional intensity rather than innocence. With The World of Love, her third feature, she continues this exploration, but in a more unsettling form. Explaining the origins of…
21st London Korean Film Festival: “The World of Love” Review
Yoon Ga-eun has spent much of her career exploring the lives of children and teenagers, paying attention to the feelings, insecurities and difficult experiences that adults often fail to recognise or take seriously. From her early short films Guest (2011) and Sprout (2013) to her acclaimed features The World of Us and The House of…
21st London Korean Film Festival 2026: Korean Cinema in the Spotlight
The London Korean Film Festival returns this November for its 21st edition, bringing together established directors, emerging filmmakers and some of Korean cinema’s most recognisable actors for two weeks of screenings, premieres and conversations. For more than two decades, the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) has introduced British audiences to the remarkable variety of stories…
70th BFI London Film Festival: In Conversation with Mokya Shin, Director of “Easter”
A photograph of a young woman posing in a swimsuit with her friends at Dadaepo beach in the 1980s might not seem important, but for South Korean filmmaker Mokya Shin, it changed the direction of Easter, his first feature documentary. The woman in the photograph was Saekja, now 68, who had spent much of her…
70th BFI London Film Festival: “Easter” Review
Sometimes, a photograph is all that remains of someone’s life, especially when their story was never considered important enough to be written down or remembered by others. Early in Mokya Shin’s Easter, Saekja sits with an old photo album, looking back at a younger version of herself and the women who once occupied that world…
70th BFI London Film Festival: In Conversation with Shalini Adnani, Director of “Our Share of Sand”
Shalini Adnani knows what it means to belong to more than one place. Born and raised in Chile in a Sindhi family of Indian origin before later moving to London, the writer-director grew up with different cultures and, as she tells us, “two different value systems”. That experience found its way into her first feature,…
70th BFI London Film Festival: “Our Share of Sand” Review
Maya comes to India to spend time with her father, and soon finds herself being asked to protect him. For a twelve-year-old who has lived in Britain, the reunion brings the promise of getting to know a parent from whom she has been separated. In Shalini Adnani’s debut feature, Our Share of Sand, that promise…
70th BFI London Film Festival: “A Girl Unknown” Review
Giving a child a new name and expecting the old life to disappear with it is simply cruel. A name is supposed to tell us who somebody is, yet in Zou Jing’s A Girl Unknown, names become evidence of how often one young girl has been asked to begin again. Six years old when we…
70th BFI London Film Festival: “Fruit Gathering” Review
Life does not offer San Kyi many choices, and although she sometimes thinks about leaving Yangon and returning to her village, she knows there may be very little work waiting for her there, which means the long days she spends in a garment factory are not simply something she can walk away from whenever she…
