Korean Film Nights 2022
Korean Film Nights (KFN) is a year-round programme of film screenings, mini-lectures and discussions that guide audiences through different aspects of Korean cinema and culture. Having run since 2008, KFN has showcased a wide spectrum of films based around a variety of different themes and is put together in collaboration with external partners to bring fresh insight and diversity to the programme.
Korean Film Nights in August offers five documentary films that draw together the frequently overlooked and undervalued labours of women and workers, whether physical or emotional.
KFN Living Memories – Programme Note
The Korean Cultural Centre UK welcomes you back once again to Korean Film Nights, our year-round programme of film screenings and talks. Following on from 2021’s theme In Transit, which focused on the documentary in relation to marginalised communities, we continue to investigate the documentary form with our new season Living Memories, curated by MA students from Birkbeck University. Drawing ...
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KFN Living Memories: Under Construction
Fri 29 Jul, 6:30pm
Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Sq
Jang’s award-winning first feature reflects on the routine of construction worker Sudoek. From a captivating, careful look, as he manufactures reinforcement bars, the film gradually uncovers the physical, emotional and mental impact of his forty-year career in construction. Jang’s compositions, as she delicately interlaces their discussions with her footage, explore the boundaries between the p...
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KFN Living Memories: Halmoni
Thu 04 Aug, 7:00pm
KCCUK
Jo Ok Sim, Halmoni (meaning grandmother in Korean) of the title, reflects on her life as she tends the flowers in her nursery farm at the southernmost tip of Argentina, Ushuaia. Arriving here in 1974 with her schoolteacher husband, he noticed that nobody grew lettuce, and persuaded the government to give him some land so he could try. This is the story of how one unassuming family changed the l...
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KFN Living Memories: Soup and Ideology
Thu 11 Aug, 7:00pm
KCCUK
After suffering an aneurysm, Yang Yonghi’s mother starts revealing tragic memories of her fleeing Korea during the Jeju incident in 1948. The Japanese-born filmmaker begins to piece together her present and her mother’s past, whom she visits in Osaka every month with her Japanese fiancé. They bond through cooking and tradition, despite their ideological differences and Yonghi’s late...
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KFN Living Memories: With or Without You
Thu 18 Aug, 7:00pm
KCCUK
With or Without You follows the lives of Magg-i and Chun-hee, both widows of the same man. After their husband has passed, the two elderly women continue to share the same house and a tender relationship blessed by moments of wit and humour. The debut documentary of Park Hyuck-jee, shot intermittently over several years, depicts the daily struggle of two women brought together by the practice o...
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Factory Complex
위로공단
Thu 25 Aug, 6:30pm
Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Sq
Drawing parallels across several decades, Factory Complex engages with the struggles and suffering of women workers in various industries across Korea and beyond. Beginning with Korean textile workers in the 1960s before taking us inside the textile industry in Cambodia today, the film confronts audiences, drawing on archival footage and testimonies of those who were present in the factories at...
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KFN Summer Nights – Programme Note
In collaboration with the students from the Film Studies, Programming and Curation MA at the National Film and Television School, the Korean Cultural Centre UK is delighted to welcome audiences for another season of Korean Film Nights 2022. As always, our year-long programme aims to foster a deeper understanding of Korean cinema and culture through thematically curated film seasons. For us, thi...
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KFN Summer Nights: The House of Us
Thu 09 Jun, 7:00pm
KCCUK
Hana longs for the kind of family who eat dinner together and go on fun-filled holidays. Instead, her summer vacation is spent eating alone and watching her parents constantly argue. When Hana’s attempts to mend their relationship fall on deaf ears, she befriends sisters, Yoo-mi and Yoo-jin, who themselves have grown weary of constantly moving and rarely seeing their parents. The lonely trio bu...
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KFN Summer Nights: House of Hummingbird
Sat 11 Jun, 5:00pm
KCCUK
In a rapidly expanding Seoul in 1994, Eun-hee’s chaotic life is bearable thanks to her secret boyfriend and best friend at Chinese class. At home, however, her parents are overbearing and distant, focused more on scolding her than addressing their own issues. Eun-hee’s world changes when a new Chinese teacher arrives who takes an interest in her feelings and teaches her about things beyond her ...
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KFN Summer Nights: Gyeongju
Thu 16 Jun, 7:00pm
KCCUK
Choi Hyeon, a Korean professor living in Beijing, returns to his homeland to attend a colleague’s funeral. There, an encounter with long-time friend Chun-won brings back memories of an obscene painting the men saw in a tea-house when visiting the city of Gyeongju. Haunted by an unresolved past, Hyeon sets out to find the artwork, only to discover it has disappeared, and that the shop is n...
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KFN Summer Nights: Sleepless Night
Thu 23 Jun, 7:00pm
KCCUK
During a long, stifling summer, a married couple in their thirties contemplate starting a family but find themselves faced with financial uncertainty. Hyun-soo works in a factory while his wife Joo-hee works as a yoga instructor, as sunny days and sweaty nights drift by, the couple’s conversations are filled with discussions of love and parenthood and all the joys and pressures associated...
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KFN Summer Nights: Poetry
Thu 30 Jun, 7:00pm
KCCUK
Mija is a 66-year-old grandmother living in a modest apartment with her uncommunicative teenage grandson, Jong-wook. Facing the onset of dementia, Mija joins a poetry class, where the tutor encourages students to see beauty in the world. As she begins to craft her poem, writing notes about the things she sees, a sense of strength awakens in Mija. However, life is about to get more complicated w...
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Modern Korea 2 – Programme Note
Korean Film Nights presents four episodes of the television documentary series Modern Korea 2, produced by the KBS television channel. Each episode uses footage selected from the vast KBS archives to create compilation narratives that look back at the social, political, and cultural themes that have marked Korea’s history over the decades. The footage and images of the series are edited from ne...
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[Modern Korea 2, Ep 4] K pop Genesis
K pop 창세기
Thu 05 May, 7:00pm
KCCUK
In the 1980s, the Korean music industry had a pattern of overworking musicians, and when profits were made they would be distributed without proper accounting regulation. Despite this environment, the innovative young musicians of the time endeavoured to make new sounds and performances, and in so doing created Korea’s first generation of electronic music and hip-hop. These pioneering musicia...
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Thu 28 Apr, 7:00pm
KCCUK
Thu 07 Apr, 8:30pm
KCCUK
Thu 07 Apr, 7:00pm
KCCUK
The Road To Sampo
삼포가는 길
Thu 24 Mar, 7:00pm
KCCUK
Korea’s greatest living writer, Hwang Sok-yong, published his much-loved story ‘The Road to Sampo’ in 1973. It is only one of his literary works to evoke the hard lives of the low-paid itinerant workforce, men and women, whose hands, shovels, picks, bodies bore the weight of Park Chung-hee regime of forced economic modernization. Lee Man-hee did not usually turn to literary texts for inspiratio...
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Director Lee Man-hee’s Films
One of the most important Korean filmmakers in the 1960s and 70s, Lee Man-hee established his reputation as a master of genre cinema, at a time the industry had yet to embrace horrors and thrillers, which have since become staples of the local film scene. Born in 1931 as the youngest of eight children, Lee took part in the Korean War as a codebreaker before entering the film industry in 1956, w...
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