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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
April 16, 2014. The South Korean nation had just witnessed a heartbreaking tragedy; Sewol ferry, with 476 passengers – mostly school students – capsized. To make the tragedy even more crushing, out of the 304 victims, 250 students from Dawon High School perished. At first, the government administration refused to apologize for the fact that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
With its 3rd edition just around the corner, London East Asia Film Festival announced an impressive 2018 line-up. Hye-Jung Jeon, the Director of LEAFF, travelled to ‘each corner’ of the globe, powered by her undying passion for cinema, to make sure that the films she will present at this year’s festival are noteworthy. Dark Figure […]
VIEW OF THE ARTS 