Drama Archives - London Korean Film Festival

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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Time to Be Strong

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 12:05:17 +0000

“Finding our way is difficult,“ says Su-min (Choi Sung-eun) in voice-over, as she emerges from Jeju Island’s airport with Tae-hee (Hyun Woo-seok) and Sa-rang (Ha Seo-yoon). They certainly look lost, out of place, even shell-shocked – like ex-cons or extra-terrestrials – and soon, Sa-rang will leave her baggage on the airport bus. At 26 they are trying to have the excursion that they missed out on as high schoolers, but these surviving members of two recently disbanded K-pop groups will spend the next few days confronting their damage, grief and guilt, and trying to find their lost youth – with help, appropriately, from a local woman (Kang Chae-yoon) who works at the Lost and Found office.

This trip through trauma exposes the seamy side of Korea’s manufactured entertainment industry, and its horrific, scarring exploitation of young people. Namkoong Sun’s story of confused kidults’ rest, recreation and recovery is indeed difficult but ultimately rewarding.

Anton Bitel

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YMCA Baseball Team

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:36:29 +0000

Set in the final years of the Empire of Korea, Lee Ho-chang (Song Kang-ho), the son of a scholar, first picks up the modern game of ‘baseball’ on a YMCA field. He then goes on to form Joseon’s first-ever baseball team with the help of Western-educated female coach Min Jung-rim (Kim Hye-soo), Japanese Confucian scholar Oh Dae-hyun (Kim Joo-hyuk), and pro-Japanese bureaucrat’s son Ryu Kwang-tae (Hwang Jung-min). The team’s ultimate game against a Japanese military team goes beyond a simple sporting match, instead transforming into a stage that symbolises the tension between a nation’s crumbling sovereignty and the late arrival of modernity.

This work is the feature film debut of director Kim Hyeon-seok and is a comedic reinterpretation of the true story of the Hwangseong YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) baseball team. As a sports movie with the texture of a romantic comedy, the film cheerfully draws out the aspirations, despondencies, and solidarity of young people trying to absorb the unfamiliar rhythm of ‘modernity’ in their own ways. When rewatched on the 80th anniversary of Korean independence, YMCA Baseball Team is a film that clearly shows how the seeds of autonomy and freedom can begin to sprout even before true ‘liberation’ arrives.

Park Se-ho

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SAVE

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:35:16 +0000

After being raised in an orphanage, Se-jeong is facing both her high school graduation as well as her release from the facility. As she works in a salon and tries to prepare for her future, suddenly a woman, Eun-sook, comes looking for her. Eun-sook, the woman who saved Se-jeong’s life from a fire at the single mothers’ care facility where she used to live, so long ago that she no longer remembers it. Eun-sook claims to have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and asks Se-jeong for a loan of 5 million Won, which is the exact amount of Se-jeong’s support grant from her orphanage. Although she has suspicions that Eun-sook may be trying to scam her, Se-jeong is moved to help. For an impoverished and lonely young woman who has only just started out on her own in an unkind world, Eun-sook, armed with her eccentricity and unusual lifestyle, becomes an unexpectedly excellent guardian. SAVE is a film that looks closely at women who find their own ways through the world rather than seeking the world’s compassion and understanding.

Son Si-nae

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Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:34:50 +0000

This understated black-and-white film uses creative cross-editing to contrast the youths of poet Yoon Dong-ju (Kang Ha-neul) and his cousin and comrade Song Mong-gyu (Park Jeong-min). The two young men, whose relationship crossed literature and belief, friendship and frustration, were arrested and imprisoned in a Fukuoka prison during the Japanese occupation. Yoon Dong-ju died on 16 February 1945, and Song Mong-gyu died only 20 days later on 7 March 1945. Rather than a huge historical drama, the film examines the tragedy of the times through the quiet lens of everyday silence and language.

Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet chooses the blank margin rather than exaggeration. It captures the ethics and fears of youth through poetry, dialogue, and small gestures, and asks a question that is still valid today: Through what is liberation possible? It relies on a background of historical events but also uses the poetic density of mise-en-scène to draw out the inner lives of the characters and remains a paragon of how Korean films deal with the idea of ‘memory.’

Park Se-ho

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The Land of Morning Calm

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:34:27 +0000

In a neglected coastal village, bullying, cantankerous Vietnam vet Yeong-guk (Yoon Joo-sang) drowns his sorrows every night, and goes out early each morning in a fishing boat that, like him, has seen better days. With his straight talk and bellowing voice, he is perhaps the worst man to keep a secret, but he has one.

Park Ri-woong’s drama is a bleak portrait of an ageing, dying community, of those left behind by Korea’s economic boom, and of a whole way of life that is running on empty. All these characters lead harsh, precarious existences – and there seems to be only one way for any of them truly to escape their misery.

Anton Bitel

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Hero

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:00:25 +0000

In 1909, revolutionary Ahn Jung-geun (Chung Sung-hwa) formed the ‘Danji Alliance’ with his comrades and headed for Harbin. One of their members, information broker Seol-hee (Kim Go-eun), infiltrates deep into the enemy camp and identifies the movements of Itō Hirobumi, Prime Minister of Japan and the mastermind behind Japanese annexation of Korea. Finally, gunshots ring at Harbin Station on 26 October 1909. After his arrest, Ahn Jung-geun is indicted and tried as a criminal under Japanese law rather than a prisoner of war, and his visits with his mother Cho Maria (Na Moon-hee) and the convictions he and his comrades hold are demonstrated through various musical numbers and scenes.

Hero is the screen adaptation of the stage musical of the same name. Rather than exaggerating the mythology of a heroic figure, the film uses music, lyrics, and images to weave a picture of the determination and solidarity of the last year of Ahn Jung-geun’s life. It was Korea’s first original musical film, and it uses the emotional influence of the musical genre to rearrange the narrative of liberation, opening a different path towards understanding historical memory.

Park Se-ho

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Break Up the Chain

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:46:49 +0000

Inspired by Sergio Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966), this Western by genre master Lee Man-hee blends chaos, betrayal, and gunfights across a lawless frontier. Set in 1930s Manchuria, it follows three adventurers competing for a priceless Buddha statue and the love of a woman. Marking the 50th anniversary of Lee’s passing in 2025, this screening honours his influence — echoed in Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008).

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3670

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:46:19 +0000

Park Joon-ho’s feature debut finds the sweet-spot intersection between two marginalised communities. For its protagonist Cheol-jun (Cho You-hyun) is both a North Korean defector, and gay. As he navigates the codified conventions of his new world(s), he tries simultaneously to come out and to fit in. Take the challenge and the plunge, and with Cheol-jun reap the eventual rewards.

Anton Bitel

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Red Nails

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:45:27 +0000

Hong is in debt and brings her mother Seo-hee, who suffers from early-stage dementia, home from a care facility. What Hong truly wants isn’t her mother, but access to her bank account. As she tries to work and build a life of her own in her late thirties, Seo-hee’s presence and worsening condition weigh heavily on her.

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