The programme brings together examples of how two pioneering Korean film collectives - Seoul Film & Jangsangotmae - established a relationship between theory and practice in order to develop a new kind of cinema, which they called ‘people’s cinema’ or ‘national cinema’. Striving for a new relationship with audiences, their films adopted another approach to their subjects, refusing privilege, and “preferring the round over the linear, sharing over possession, and liberation over incarceration”, as filmmaker Jang Sun-Woo expressed in 1983 in the manifesto ‘Toward an Open Cinema’.