We’re thrilled to be part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival, presenting two strands of films from their four week programme. For their Classics Revisited strand the LKFF bring together three visionary films by the influential and rebellious filmmaker Lee Chang-ho, co-founder of the Young Sung Shi Dae (Visual Age) group – a collection of like-minded Korean artists who sought to creatively push the boundaries of cinema, following the example set by the British Free Cinema and French Nouvelle Vague movements.

Building on last year’s screening and discussion series Embeddedness: Artist Films and Videos from Korea 1960s to Now at Tate Modern, the LKFF’s new artist's film and video strand continues to focus on significant artist's work from Korea, proposing a survey through three decades of work by video artist Seoungho Cho. Finally we end the festival with a screening of artist and filmmaker Sung-a Yoon’s first feature-length documentary – a deeply personal and ambitious family travelogue that doubles as a clinical examination of society and culture in Korea.

Programme 1: The Visual Age: Three Films by Lee Chang-ho

Good Windy Days
Lee Chang-ho
1980 | 113 min | Colour | 35mm
Followed by Q&A with Lee Chang-ho

One of Lee's most politically confrontational films, Good Windy Days uses its intertwined narrative of three young men coming of age in 1980s Seoul to cut a pointed cross-section across a society undergoing painful and contradictory transition. Good Windy Days is celebrated as one of the seminal Korean films of the 1980s and an important first expression of the political urgency and artistic sophistication of the Korean New Wave.

The Man with Three Coffins
Lee Chang-ho
1987 | 104 min | Colour | 35mm
Followed by Q&A with Lee Chang-ho  

Lee's inimitable masterpiece is a hypnotic trance film and drifting road movie that follows a melancholy widower's journey back into his past as he travels to his dead wife's rural hometown to spread her ashes. Stylistically daring, The Man with Three Coffins uses a floating voice-over and avant-garde montage to evoke, with striking frankness, its anti-hero's sexually charged fears and stinging frustrations.

Eoh Wu-dong
Lee Chang-ho
1985 | 110 min | Colour | 35mm  

Taking place amongst the dynastic infighting of the Chonsun dynasty, Lee uses the period film to openly critique political factionalism and the legacy of Confucianism, offering his headstrong and liberated heroine as an emblem of a defiant and individualism and feminism. Euodong's dizzying sexuality imbues its every image with the heady perfume of unleashed desire, bringing an electric intensity to the lush colour scheme and expressionist landscapes.
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Programme 2: Shifted Horizon: The Videos of Seoungho Cho

Presented in collaboation with LUX, this new strand on artist's film and video at the LKFF continues to focus on significant artist's work from Korea, proposing a survey through three decades of work by video artist Seoungho Cho. read more

The Island with Striped Sky, 1993, 10 min, Colour, Digital
Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again, 1995, 11 min, Colour, Digital
Identical Time, 1997, 14 min, Colour, Digital
Cold Pieces, 1999, 11 min, B/W & Colour, Digital
1/1, 2001, 4 min, B/W & Colour, Digital
Orange Factory, 2002, 12 min, Colour, Digital
Shifted Horizon, 2009, 6 min, Colour, Digital
Latency/Contemplation 1, 2016, 6 min, Colour, Digital

Programme 3: Missing Links

Episode 4: because the outside world has changed...
Im Go-eun
2016 | 8 min | Colour | Digital

Combining archival images and essayistic narration, Episode 4 reflects on the Dutch Filmmuseum at a moment of critical technological and institutional change: the Filmmuseum’s transformation into EYE and relocation from the Vondelpark to the north bank of Amsterdam’s waterfront in 2012.

Full of Missing Links
Sung-a Yoon
2012 | 68 min | Colour | Digital

After having her first child, Sung-a Yoon sets out to find her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since her parents’ separation when she was still a child. Travelling to Korea with her boyfriend and son, a video camera and a sound recorder, she documents the whole process. The result is a tender, and often humorous, family travelogue. Full of Missing Links also proposes a clinical examination of society and culture in Korea, a country which – like Sung-a herself – has been marked by separation.
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More info:
koreanfilm.co.uk
www.lux.org.uk