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London Korean Film Festival 2024: Every November, when winter starts to kick in, I know I have a cinematic box of delights lined up in the shape of the annual London Korean Film Festival. What’s notable is that this started as a multi-venue event where you had to play catch-up, tracking down sites all over town, then eventually went more mainstream at Regent Street Cinema and Picturehouse Central. It now feels extremely legit in being based almost exclusively at the BFI Southbank. The bonus, as ever, is enjoying some scholarly introductions, plus post-screening Q&As with directors.
There are fewer themed strands across the festival now, but thankfully there’s still a great bundle of movies by female filmmakers in a strand called Women’s Voices. And there’s a discussion on the subject to help contextualise and tie the films together. The association with the BFI is paying off in an even bigger way though, with their Southbank home putting on a major season of classic and new Korean cinema across November and December (of which, more later).
The London Korean Film Festival 2024’s opening film Victory is a feel-good movie from director, Park Beom-su, complete with classic K-Pop soundtrack, harking back to 1999, the year in which the action is set, with the new millennium imminent – and everyone hooked on their pagers. The location is a claustrophobic small town, with a struggling fishing industry. The high school football team is failing miserably and the school misfits and rebels propose starting a cheerleading team to support them. With lots of neat dance sequences and much teamwork and bonding, set against generational misunderstandings, this teen comedy foregrounds the value of friendship and dreams, and is reminiscent of the recent, more serious US cheerleading drama, Backspot. The welcome Q&A with Park Beom-su answered some of the questions that arose – for example, he wanted it to be uplifting, as it was planned during the dark days of Covid; he selected the leading actresses from K-Pop bands; and yes, he was influenced by both Bring It On and Billy Elliot.
At the other end of the scale in optimism/nihilism is definitely The Tenants, from Yoon Eun-kyun, which manages to be a little bit Orwellian, but mainly Kafkaesque. This compelling 90-minute black and white drama has nods to Metamorphosis and The Castle, and makes you feel as stuck as the protagonist, boxed in and eternally claustrophobic. This young guy needs to make some cash and decides to sublet part of his small apartment – to the weirdest tenants you could find, an extremely odd couple who are happy set up home in his tiny bathroom. The swirl of smog around the city increases the feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia, and there’s an element of horror in there too. You might think he could ask these now sitting tenants to leave, but the plot thickens in an unexpected direction, the power balance shifts, and dreams and reality blur. Every moment is made even more disturbing by the excellent sound design as a nightmare is made flesh. Chillingly brilliant.
The Women’s Voices strand had its own forum as its centrepiece, with directors Kim Hye-young (It’s Okay), above, and Kim Da-min (FAQ), together with Professor Jinhee Choi of Kings College, London, and hosted by film programmer Hyun Jin-Cho from the Korean Cultural Centre. Biggest initial revelation (which I had to follow up on) was that the majority of female Korean filmmakers only make one film, then their career ends. Even if they are successful with their debut, it can take around a decade for them to get any funding and backing for their second feature. Kim Da-min says there’s pressure to move to commercial filmmaking – to tell a “big story” if you’re successful – which is hard for indie directors. Kim Hye-young says women tend to make romantic films as their debuts because they’re seen as better at handling sensitive subjects. You make a profit and get the opportunity to make your next film, but are encouraged to make them on a smaller budget – so for something like a thriller, the answer is ‘no’. There’s prejudice against female filmmakers, she says, and a narrow view of what they should do.
Professor Jinhee Choi remarked that one female filmmaker actually opened a restaurant in order to make enough money to finance her film, and along with those who wait ages to make their next film (or never do) there are many who go to work on TV series, including Kim Da-min herself (A Killer Paradox, Netflix 2024). Kim Hye-young says she worked in TV for 15 years as an assistant director, yet was still treated as a newcomer when making her own feature, which made the workplace challenging to navigate. People would even describe to her what cinema was, which could be upsetting and sometimes challenging. She says women are treated as if they’ll be hysterical or hypersensitive.
Kim Da-min added that although she won a competition after writing a script, they simply did not want her to make FAQ. The hardest thing by far was getting the funding, so in the end she did the Netflix TV series to make ends meet. She was told that she didn’t have the personality of a director – a ‘macho’ personality. But she reckons they’ve proved you don’t have to be like that, and “we can encourage others this way.” She just hopes that their horizons broaden, and they can make genre films freely.
For Kim Hye-young it was a case of promising herself she would survive and tell the stories that she wanted to tell. There’s still a hesitancy to let women make big budget films, she says, yet we can tell these stories well. “I don’t think that women are the weaker members of society any more. But some still perceive us in that way.” Her hope is that prejudice about female directors disappears – and that there’s eventually no differentiation. “Just call them all directors.”
As for the actual movies in the Women’s Voices strand, they all had varied subject matter, but obviously included strong female roles.
Boo Ji-young, director of Sisters on the Road (2008), found a small audience for her feature debut on its initial release, but its influence on subsequent films is obvious, and it’s since been re-mastered and thankfully re-appraised. Maybe it was ahead of its time in its subject, and that time has now come? It’s a road movie, as the title suggests, and though it was not a hit at the time, its characters soon make you a willing passenger on the ride. The two half-sisters are like chalk and cheese, one neat and tidy and organised, the other not. They’re going on the journey because their mother has died suddenly, and they are searching for their estranged father. They constantly snipe at each other, yet the movie has bags of charm, especially from this Korean but not-exactly-Thelma-and-Louise duo. We get flashbacks to fill in any narrative gaps – so things slot into place and make sense – and I am not going to give any spoilers, but suffice to say you will not see the ending coming.
FAQ (above) from Kim Da-min is hard to pin down and categorise – which is part of its appeal. Maybe we should call it witty sci-fi with family matters at its heart. The chief protagonist, Dong Chun, is a stressed and tired young schoolgirl with pushy parents who get her to learn new languages, tae kwon do, and many other subjects – while also wanting her to be taller. She is the smartest person around, but has few friends, so is immediately struck by a bottle of fermenting Korean rice wine (makgeolli) that starts talking to her through bubbling out Morse code. As the pressure on Dong Chun increases, she clings on (sometimes literally) to the rapidly growing amount of the liquid, moving it into a bigger vessel and translating its messages from Morse code to Persian (yes, she’s studied both) and finally into Korean. The family subplot bounces along, revealing her grandmother has dementia, and there’s a mysterious uncle too. The movie could easily appeal to the same smart audience as Inside Out, if it gets a push, as the kid in the main role (Park Na-eun) is utterly brilliant. In fact, her director admitted that this character is probably “60 per cent” herself. She wanted to give a different perspective on private schooling and the pressure on kids, but the main thing was to achieve the fine balance of making it all from Dong Chun’s point of view, so that the adult characters don’t dominate the story and her choices. Seek it out!
Somehow I managed to miss Girl At My Door when it first came out in 2014, and oh boy, I’m glad I caught it now, as this debut feature from July Jung is a total treat of a small-town thriller. Produced by Lee Changdong, of Secret Sunshine, Peppermint Candy, Poetry and Burning fame, the idea for the movie caught his attention in a screenwriting contest he was judging, and though July Jung didn’t win, he liked the concept and wanted to help her develop it. She said it was about loneliness when she made it, and you can see this in the plot of a stranger in a strange land – an exiled policewoman from Seoul sent to hick country. Here she encounters casual racism, bullying, misogyny, violence, and drunkenness (which doesn’t help with her own drinking problem “some drink to remember/some drink to forget” as Billy Joel once observed). There’s also a side plot in which undocumented migrant workers are exploited and trapped there. The main thrust is that the cop (played by the always excellent Bae Doona) comes across a vulnerable girl who is being abused (played by Kim Sae-ron, also great) and takes her in to protect her from her violent and controlling stepfather. They are drawn to each other, and as the film progresses, there are visual cues and echoes in their appearances, right down to matching haircuts and stances – and maybe the feeling of an alter-ego. When a bitter ex-girlfriend suddenly appears, you sense trouble brewing for the cop, as her sexuality can be used against her. There’s a bonus of fantastic framing and use of colour throughout, and I can’t wait to see it again. Incredibly, it took eight long years for July Jung to make her next, equally amazing, feature, Next Sohee, a timeframe that bears out what was discussed in the Women’s Voices forum. Seek out both films, is my advice.
Lee Mi-rang’s Concerning My Daughter is adapted from a novel, and manages to retain the sensitivity of the original, while addressing so many current concerns. There’s a huge irony at the heart of the plot and its central characters, as an open, hugely empathetic mother, who cares for the elderly, is a closed door to her own daughter’s sexuality and partner. Ambitious, on the button and beautifully directed, the film has much to say on generational misunderstandings and the definition of ‘caring’. Hoping Lee Mi-rang just doesn’t have to wait another eight years to make her next feature.
Directed by Kim Soo-yong, Mist is a black and white classic from 1967, all fog and maddening loneliness, with slithers of sensuality. And if you want to know where Park Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave got its inspiration, you need look no further. Some of the audacious editing and imagery feels ahead of its time, and it again leaves you wanting to plunge further into classic Korean films with Golden Age and New Korean Cinema. You can do this in the BFI Southbank’s season, Echoes in Time – and on the BFI streaming website.
For those who failed to immerse themselves in the London Korean Film Festival 2024, make a note that the next one is in November 2025. Book as much as you can, the moment it’s announced. You’ll thank me for it.
Find out more about the London Korean Film Festival 2024 here: KoreanFilm.co.uk and KCCUK.org.uk, plus BFI Southbank.
Also check out last year’s LKFF Review!