Director’s Intention, transcript of introduction to a screening at the London Korean Film Festival 2022 “Your name goes on top of the ending credit, but it doesn’t mean it’s all yours. All the others care about the movie as much as you do.” This is what, some way into Kim Min-geun’s feature Director’s Intention, the…
Kingmaker, transcript of introduction to screening at London Korean Film Festival, 2022 At the beginning of Kingmaker, in a backwater of Gangwon Province in 1961, a smallhold farmer complains to the local pharmacist Seo Chang-dae (Lee Sun-kyun) about a neighbour whom the farmer has himself witnessed stealing his chickens’ eggs at night. The problem is…
Seire screened for the London Korean Film Festival 2021 Seire, also know as samchil-il, is a 21-day ritual period of post-partum confinement for a newborn baby, during which time protective saekki ropes are hung over the threshold, special dietary measures are observed, only immediate family are allowed to visit, and the new parents, if they…
The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, transcript of introduction to a screening for the London Korean Film Festival 2022 ‘Thoracic’ is one of those highly technical, slightly pedantic words, like ‘synecdoche’ or ‘symbiopsychotoxiplasm’, whose specialised obscurity ensures that its appearance in a title makes an immediate impression of a certain eccentricity. When you settle down to watch…
Contorted, transcript of an on-stage introduction given at a screening for the London Korean Film Festival 2022 Contorted is concerned with the ineffable, deeply transgressive taboos of motherly abuse and filicide. As such, it falls into a line that can be traced back at least to the Ancient Greek tragedy (of which this film is…
Hot Blooded (Ddeu-geo-un pi), script of my on-stage introduction to its screening at the London Korean Film Festival, 2022 Cheon Myeong-kwan is a novelist and screenwriter. In the Nineties, he co-scripted Chang Gil-soo’s I Wish What is Forbidden To Me (1994) and Kim Eui-suk’s Gun and Gun (1995) and A Great Chinese Restaurant (1999). Then…
Stellar: A Magical Ride, first presented as an on-stage introduction to its screening at the London Korean Film Festival 2022 You wait for one Korean film where various parties go in chaotic pursuit of a car and its contents, and two come along. Lee Jae-won’s capitalist parable Thunderbird is a tense, shabby, Safdie-esque tale of…