In memory of Kang Soo-yeon – Programmer’s Note
For a good decade and a half, from the mid-1980s till the end of the 1990s, Kang Soo-yeon was one of the most significant actors in Korean television and film. After that period, she made the odd cameo (With a Girl of Black Soil 2007, Sunny 2011), even tried her hand at crime-horror (The Circle 2003) or performed in limited roles in films such as the bombastic Hanbando (2006) or Im Kwon-...
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LKFF 2022: Documentary – Programmer’s Note
2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Pannori Arirang (1982). Though there’s room for dispute, the film is widely understood to be Korea’s very first ‘independent’ documentary, and was also an original work of the Seoul Film Collective, formed by key members of the Seoul National University ‘Yalashang’ film club. Though there had been documentaries before this, they were at best gov...
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LKFF 2022: Cinema Now – Programmer’s Note
Every past, and every future, begins in its own now. Though ideally timeless, and typically manifesting some time after they were originally conceived, films are always instantiated in and bound to the present of their release – and so while there are other strands in the London Korean Film Festival which take a more retrospective or historic look at the national filmic output, the purpos...
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After Dark: K-Horror – Programmer’s Note
Korean horror, or K-horror, has history. It could be argued that Kim Ki-young’s classic The Housemaid (1960) was horror in much the same way that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) were. The Housemaid was certainly as influential as these films (and has been remade many times, including twice by Kim himself). Yet it was in the Hallyu, or Korean W...
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Celebrating Kang Soo-yeon
The 2022 London Korean Film Festival Special Focus strand celebrates actress Kang Soo-yeon. Beloved within Korea as a young actor, Kang became well known on the international stage with her breakout role in Im Kwon-taek’s The Surrogate Woman in 1987. Kang won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 44th Venice International Film Festival for her role, making her the first Korean actor to receive ...
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