London Korean Film Festival

Special Focus: A Century of Korean Cinema

Film

London Korean Film Festival 2019

With a selection of films that helped change the cinematic landscape of Korea, the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) returns for its 14th instalment with a celebration of 100 years of the silver screen.

The Devil’s Stairway

Young Dr Hyeon has, it seems, everything going for him. A good position at a private hospital, the attentions of the daughter of that institution ...

Aimless Bullet

Aimless Bullet is Yu Hyun-mok’s most exemplary work and a key piece of Korean realist cinema. The film captures the collective anxiety of ...

A Hometown of the Heart

A boy lives as an orphan-acolyte in a peaceful mountain temple. Unbeknownst to him, his impoverished mother comes to catch just a glimpse of him ...

Piagol

A band of ‘red’ partisans runs up a mountain gorge under fire. We the spectators enter with them into Piagol – Pia Valley – at full speed ...

The Flower in Hell

Dong-shik, an innocent young man from the countryside, arrives in Seoul in search of his brother. Amongst the busy streets, markets and American army bases ...

A Coachman

From the moment of its release in 1961, A Coachman became a milestone in Korean cinema, the first film from the country to win a ...

A Woman Judge

“I will defend her to the end!” Heo Jin-suk, the titular protagonist of Hong Eun-won’s first film – and only the second Korean feature by ...

Bloodline + Q&A

Bloodline is set in a divided Korea and unfolds in Seoul’s Haebangchon district, where many of those displaced from North Korea have settled. The ...

Goryeojang

Goryeojang is a term used to describe the mythical custom of abandoning one’s parents in the mountains once they reach old age. Kim Ki-young ...

Homebound

Homebound (1967), alongside Full Autumn (1966) and A Day Off (1968), is known as one of Lee Man-hee’s masterpieces of melodrama. Lee is known ...

A Day Off

Seoul. Winter. Sunday. One fairly dodgy-looking young man, one pregnant young woman, and a pack of cigarettes. From this raw material Lee Man-hee, the most ...

Ieoh Island

This is an extinction rebellion! Ieoh Island, Kim Ki-young’s third film with his young star Lee Hwa-si, is justly hailed as the most bizarre ...

A Pillar of Mist

A young woman seems to have everything going for her. She graduates from university, finds a job in publishing and marries her handsome boyfriend. Soon ...

Ticket

Min Ji-sok (Kim Ji-mee) is the no-nonsense owner of a cafe in the tough port town Sokcho. Her ‘girls’ serve more than tea or coffee ...

The Man With Three Coffins

A gloomy man wanders the wintry eastern sea coast bearing the ashes of his wife. Her home had been in North Korea, and he feels ...

The Age of Success

A year after the release of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) with its sardonic credo of “greed is good”, director Jang Sun-woo unveiled what ...

Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?

A boy Hae-jin, young monk Ki-bong and very old monk Hye-gok inhabit a small, dilapidated hermitage up in the mountains. Below lies a main temple ...

North Korean Partisan in South Korea + Q&A

Lee Tae (Ahn Sung-ki), a travelling correspondent for the North Korean news agency, finds himself plunged into battle as the tide begins to turn against ...

A Single Spark

Long before the box office titans A Taxi Driver (1976) and 1987: When the Day Comes (2017), Korean New Wave filmmaker Park Kwang-su made the ...

The Day a Pig Fell Into a Well

Never released in the UK, LKFF regular Hong Sangsoo’s debut heralded a striking new international voice back in 1996. Here, Hong follows four people ...

Three Friends

Three friends with unusual nicknames - Independent Party, Pork Belly and Mr Sensitive - celebrate their high school graduation by eating noodles and snooping around their local ...

The Contact + Q&A

Among the many classic romantic dramas of Korean cinema which emerged in the late 1990s, The Contact holds a very special place, both as the ...

Peppermint Candy

"I am going back!" declares Kim Yong-ho (Sul Kyung-gu) at the beginning of Peppermint Candy, as he stands on a rail bridge, his arms ...

More about this programme

London Korean Film Festival