Drama Archives - London Korean Film Festival

Journey There

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:39:25 +0000

Recently widowed Chun hee (Kim Hye-ok) has downsized from the house that she shared with her late husband Hyun chul, and has moved into an apartment building — but Hyun chul’s exquisite grand piano cannot fit in. Her new neighbour, conductor Min jun (Justin H. Min), who has moved from Germany to find the birth mother, offers to look after the piano in his apartment. Together with an orphaned piano prodigy whom Min jun has taken under his wing, they briefly form a family unit.

Kim Jin-yu’s follow-up to Bori (2018) is concerned with mortality and moving on. For it is a film of absences, where everyone is mourning the loss of someone else and burdened with their grief — but it also looks forward to the next generation’s future, lovingly handed down by previous ones.

Anton Bitel

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Bedford Park

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:09:18 +0000

36-year-old Korean-American Audrey Park (Moon Choi) is bound by the expectations of her traditionalist mother and alcoholic father. When an accident brings her into contact with Eli (Son Sukku), an adopted Korean, gruff ex-wrestler, these two lost souls find that in one another’s company they are at last able to breathe.

Stephanie Ahn’s feature-length expansion of her short film Accident (2023) uses romantic drama to explore cultural clash and intergenerational trauma in the Korean diaspora, while hinting at its end at a whole new generation of han. The film won the US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Debut Feature at Sundance Film Festival.

Anton Bitel

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Mad Dance Office

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:05:02 +0000

District Office director Guk-hee (Yeom Hye-ran) has lived her whole life without a moment of respite. Despite having held her position longer and worked harder than anyone, she finds herself unfairly passed over for a promotion due to a colleague’s interference; her workload is drastically reduced; and her daughter suddenly announces that she feels trapped at home and decides to move out. When Guk-hee visits a flamenco studio for work, she finds an unexpected refuge…

Mad Dance Office is a lively comedy that creatively combines the dramatic gestures of flamenco dance with the uncertain steps of a woman in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Loosening a long-stiffened body and following the rhythm of music can be challenging, but through the brief moment of freedom one experiences while dancing—one might find a window leading to a new possibility of life.

Son Si-nae

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The World of Love

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:48:36 +0000

The World of Love depicts the story of Joo-in (Seo Su-bin), a seventeen-year-old high school girl who keeps her thoughts and feelings to herself. She receives mysterious notes after refusing to participate in a school-wide petition signed by all of her fellow students. The film title is a clever and poignant word play as ‘Joo-in’ sounds like ‘owner’ in Korean, suggesting both a personal agency and the reclaiming of her story.

Known for her sensitive portrayals of childhood in The World of Us (2016) and The House of Us (2019), director Yoon Ga-eun turns her attention to adolescence with greater depth and a broader perspective, expanding her cinematic world. With a remarkable cast of young actors, many with little or no previous film experience, she crafts a powerful story about courage, resilience and finding the strength to shape one’s own life.

Eunji Lee

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The Mutation

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:24:36 +0000

Se-oh (Han Hyun-min) works at an amusement park as a white-tiger-costumed mascot and collapses one day due to overwork. He then makes a resolution with himself — buys a luxury suitcase and goes trav. He gets on the subway and finds So-ra (Lee Zoo-young) appears at his side. The Mutation explores their journey gradually explores the facets of their pasts as well: Se-oh, who is of Black, mixed-race descent but knows little about the circumstances of his birth, feels that it is safer for him to live in society wearing a mask, while So-ra has lived under shadows following the death of her same-sex lover. Rather than portraying a grand moment of salvation, the film shines light on the simple but powerful gesture of reaching a hand out to someone who has fallen.

Son Si-nae

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En Route To

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:30:06 +0000

En Route To opens with the revelation of a secret held by Yun-ji (Sim Subin), something that has been plaguing her with anxiety. The homeroom teacher with whom Yun-ji had been having an affair suddenly disappears after she tells him about her pregnancy. Left with not that many choices, Yun-ji steals the savings from her dorm roommate Kyung-sun (Lee Jiwon) to buy illegal abortion pills. Kyung-sun sets out to find Yun-ji and recover her missing money but ends up uncovering Yun-ji’s secret at the end of her chase.

This coming-of-age drama confronts societal blind spots around the termination of adolescent pregnancies and also explores the formation of a loose companionship between the two as they seek possible solutions to the current situation. They find themselves not “en route” to a fixed destination along a straight, open road, but rather on a winding, bumpy trail, sometimes interrupted along the way.

Son Si-nae

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My Daughter Is a Zombie

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:19:49 +0000

When a zombie virus strikes, wild animal trainer Jung-hwan (Cho Jung-seok) tries to escape the city with his daughter Soo-ah (Choi Yu-ri), but an attack leaves the girl infected. Convinced that she still retains her human heart, he takes Soo-ah to a seaside village where her grandmother Bam-soon (Lee Jung-eun) lives, and begins a life-or-death mission to retrain his daughter using the skills he has developed with animals.

Directed by Pil Gam-sung and based on Lee Yoon-chang’s hugely popular webtoon, My Daughter Is a Zombie combines adventurous comedy with heartfelt drama in a touching ode to parental love. Lee Jung-eun brings warmth and comic brilliance to the beloved Bam-soon. Pil Gam-sung brings a fresh and unconventional approach to the zombie genre through his distinctive visual style and clever use of colour.

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The Journey to Gyeong-ju

admin — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:07:41 +0000

Ok-sil (Lee Jung-eun) and her three adult daughters (Kong Hyo-jin, Park So-dam, Lee Yeon) may seem merely to be out on a family pilgrimage to commemorate the birthday of Ok-sil’s long-deceased youngest daughter Gyeong-ju, but in fact this is a journey of revenge.

The yellow combi van in which these characters are travelling points to both the similar vehicle (and similar dysfunctional family comedy) of Little Miss Sunshine (2006), and to the similarly colour-coded female revenge of the Kill Bill films (2003-4). Both intertexts prove relevant in Kim Mi-jo’s feature, where the absurdity of this eccentric, clashing clan is offset by a rather serious engagement with the nature and morality of vendetta. This begins by looking for laughs, and ends by raising questions — and the resulting blend of eccentric characters and mismatched genres is never less than engaging and compelling.

Content Warning: depiction of violence

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Time of Cinema

admin — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:32:00 +0000

This reflexive anthology comprises a framing story in a projection booth, and three short films: Lee Jong-pil’s Chimpanzee , Yoon Ga-eun’s Naturally and Jang Kun-jae’s The Time of Younghwa. All are set — to varying degrees — in a cinema, and all pose questions about what movies are for, where their magic lies, and how their on-screen fictions are able to trigger memories, mediate dreams and touch the viewer’s core identity.

Anton Bitel

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Frosted Window

admin — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 11:39:23 +0000

Three episodes, each set in a different season in the Seochon neighbourhood of Seoul’s Jongno District. The first two are bright and breezy affairs about the vagaries of love – and the last is a weightier, wintry story about a feeling of loss so complex that it must be uncovered from the involuted layers of different media (a diary, letters, poetry, a screenplay, a film-within-a-film, a flower arrangement).

With films like Come, Closer (2010), The Table (2016) and Shades of the Heart (2021), writer/director Kim Jong-kwan has carefully honed his mastery of the anthology form, collecting into a feature frame highly crafted short films which each work independently, but also reflect and interplay with each other to offer a bigger picture of the human condition. Delicate and witty, metacinematic and melancholic, this latest is a Rohmer-esque love letter to Seochon, and to our capacity for both fickleness and more profound change.

Anton Bitel

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