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…
Tag: Korean Cinema
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: In Conversation with Park Hoon-jung and Kim Da-mi of ‘The Witch – Part 1. The Subversion’
Thanks to his distinctive and thoughtful writing style Park Hoon-jung has attracted a vast number of international and domestic fans for his work on Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil and Ryoo Seung-wan’s The Unjust. He then traded in his writing skills for directing, and in 2013 he made New World, an intriguing film that is arguably one of the most…
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: 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: In Conversation with Jang Joon-hwan, Director of ‘1987: When the Day Comes’
Jang Joon-hwan’s first journey into filmmaking started in 1994, when he directed the short film 2001 Imagine. Before moving to make his first feature Save the Green Planet – an odd mix of genres such as thriller, comedy and science fiction, that is now considered to be a cult film – he worked as a cinematographer, scriptwriter…
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 Internationational Film Festival: In Conversation with Kim Bora, Director of ‘House of Hummingbird’
There is nothing better than an unexpectedly great film that makes you experience the entire palette of human emotions – a film that makes you reminisce, steep yourself in its characters and see the world through their eyes, giving you an experience that might end up opening your own eyes a bit further. A film…
62nd BFI London Film Festival: The Spy Gone North Review
The historical drama is a tale that is constantly over-shadowed by its real-life counterpart’s undoing. No matter which way the film may elude to direct itself, the foreboding presence of certain real-life individuals makes clear to an audience which way the film will steer. This is especially the case when dealing with the infamous Kim…
In Conversation with Lee Jin-mu, South Korean Actor, Model and Filmmaker
Can one scene from a film change a young boy’s life? That seems to be the case for Lee Jin-mu, a South Korean actor, filmmaker and a model, who got struck by the acting bug when he saw an emotional scene from Eyes of Dawn, one of the most popular TV dramas of the 1990’s:…
