Author: Hayley Scanlon

Commission (커미션, Shin Jae-min, 2025)

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What is it about art that conjures such frustration? Dan-kung (Kim Hyeon-soo) is consumed by resentment and deep-seated feelings of inferiority while certain that she will forever be trapped beneath the shadow of her sister, Ju-kyung (Kim Yong-ji), a popular webtoon artist. Dan-kyung dreams of being a webtoon artist too, but she’s convinced herself she isn’t good enough, mainly due to a childhood incident when she won first prize in a competition but only after her sister had made her mark on her painting. 

The tragedy might be in a way that it never seems to have occurred to the sisters that they could simply have worked together and that even if someone else helps you, that doesn’t mean that the work is any less your own. After all, most manhwa artists have assistants who do the bulk of the actual drawing. Ju-kyung has them herself, as does the kindly Mok, a former master taking his first steps into a new digital world. Mok sees potential in Dan-kyun, even if her colleagues haze and bully her and she only got the job thanks to Ju-kung’s connections. He’s working on a space epic titled Ozymandias that’s an attempt to make up for a project that never got to see the light of day having been suppressed during the authoritarian era. 

Dan-kyung uses the title of Mok’s lost manhwa, Taiji, as her username on a Japanese dark web forum that her sleazy colleague introduces her to where people pay vast sums to commission extreme artwork. The most obvious meaning of “Taiji” in Japanese is “foetus” (胎児), though it can also mean “extermination” (退治) as in of pests or demons, or “confrontation’ (対峙). It’s not clear that Dan-kyung would know this, nor that Mok intended the title of his manhwa to be read as Japanese or what he might have meant by it if he did. There is however, something in the idea that Dan-kyun still taking shape, as yet unborn just like Mok’s never released manwha. She defines herself in confrontation with her sister, as if she were the unborn twin forever languishing in darkness. Ju-kyung’s hit manhwa is titled Day and Night, and might itself hint at the contrast between them. While Jun-kyung enjoys the trappings of success, Dan-kyung finds the key to her art in her internal darkness, producing her best work drawing images of vile and sickening things for the benefit of her online fans. Her success mirrors Ju-kyun’s even it’s underground where only those in the know can see.

It gives her a new sense of confidence that would allow her to make progress in the mainstream world too, if her self-destructive actions didn’t have a habit of ruining things. Ju-kyung has a point when she describes Dan-kyung as a kind of jinx who ruins everything and everyone around her. Her biggest fan online is calls Hannya (Kim Jin-woo), which is the name for a demonic noh mask representing a woman who has become consumed by her jealousy. As Dan-kyun gets deeper into the online world, it becomes more difficult to tell if any of this is real or merely a symptom of her delusions. Hannya talks to her in a mix of Japanese and Korean, their androgynous quality inviting some uncomfortable readings but also echoing Dan-kyun’s nature as something as yet incomplete or a part of a separated whole. 

Another teacher at the art academy where Dan-kyun had been working bluntly states that some of the students aren’t worthy of teaching because they’re afraid to push themselves in case they find out that they’re not good enough. Ju-kyung initially seems sympathetic, telling Dan-kyung that understanding your limits is also a “talent” while seemingly encouraging her by getting her the job with Mok, but Dan-kyung later wonders if it isn’t Ju-kyung who is afraid and actively standing in her way because she can’t bear the thought that Dan-kyung might actually be better than her. Mok tells that “perseverance” is a “talent” too, though his frustrated apprentice who lost out to “genius” Ju-kyung, speaks of it more like purgatory. He knows deep down that he doesn’t have what it takes to make it, and doesn’t think Dan-kyung does either, but they keep at because of that vague hope that just maybe it’ll happen one day. But Mok described Ju-kyung’s talent as curse too, correctly predicting the paralysing fear and self-fulfilling prophecy that one day it’ll just abandon her and she won’t have anything to say any more.

The irony is, however, that every time Dan-kyung makes one of her bad decisions, something good would have happened anyway. The harsh teacher whom she wronged after they won an award she wanted, mellows once she gets used to success and apologises to Dan-kyung for “overreacting”. Dan-kyung discovers she’s actually getting a job she thought she lost a little while after plotting revenge and ruining the opportunity. Things would have worked out for her, if only she’d had a little more patience and self-confidence. It’s true enough that she’s motivated by spite and resentment, pettily striking back at those that have what she wants or have caused her to feel humiliated, but not really thinking through the consequences and assuming that everything will go the way she wants it to once she’s removed this one piece of the puzzle or replaced it with one of her own.

In unmasking herself, she reclaims her identity from Ju-kyung and finally becomes whole while echoing Mok’s words that Taiji needs readers, as if her art would remain forever unborn if no one ever got to see it. The pain in her wrist hints at the physical labour of creation, one that a more successful artist may no longer need to endure, while in other ways she is in the process of giving birth to herself. But Dan-kyung’s vision of art may also be flawed in her need for other people to see it, fixating on the fame and acclaim, even the money that comes with it, rather than in the simple art of creation in which it wouldn’t matter if her art sat in a desk drawer for the next 40 years because she had made it and made it for herself. Hannya has their “art” too, as grim as it may be, though aside from their first piece, they seem to hide the results. Another tortured artist, Dan-kyung has turned inward in bitterness and resentment, but wreaks her vengeance externally while otherwise continuing to dream of a mainstream success that may in itself be merely artifice.

Commission screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hero (영웅, JK Youn, 2022)

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An Jung-geun is a key figure in modern Korean history whose story has been dramatised numerous times and given rise to its own legend. JK Youn’s Hero (영웅, Yeong-ung) is, however, the first movie musical devoted to his life and adapted from a stage hit that has been running since 2009. It has to be said that structurally the musical owes a fair amount to Les Misérables with a dramatic first act closer that is more than a little reminiscent of One Day More, while a number about meat buns echoes the kind of comic relief provided by Master of the House, though the rhythm might hint at Sweeney Todd’s meditation on pie making.

It is certainly out of keeping with the intensity surrounding it as the focus is, after all, on an attempt to stop the Japanese colonising Korea and practising even more cruelty. An Jung-geun abandons his family in the early part of the film, but this isn’t seen as a moral failing or irresponsibility so much as evidence of his devotion to the cause that he sacrifices a peaceful life as a husband and father. His revolutionary activity is furthermore filial because his mother encourages it, later writing him a letter while he is imprisoned urging him not to appeal his sentence but accept his death as a martyr. To appeal would mean accepting the Japanese’s authority in begging for his life. Jung-geun had wanted to be tried not as a murderer, but as a soldier fighting a war and therefore sees his trial as illegitimate. He insists he is a political prisoner, a rousing number outlines 15 reasons why the man he assassinated, Ito Hirobumi Japan’s first prime minister and resident-general of Korea, deserved to die which include dethroning the Emperor Gojong, assassinating the Korean Empress Myeongseong (Lee Il-hwa), lying to the world that Korea wanted Japanese protection, plunder, and massacring Koreans (all of which the Japanese had done). 

It’s the assassination of Empress Myeongseong that motivates the film’s secondary heroine, Seol-hee (Kim Go-eun), a former palace made now operating as a resistance spy in Japan under the name Yukiko. Seol-hee’s impassioned songs have curiously homoerotic quality and take the place of a central romance which the piece otherwise lacks except in the tentative relationship between Jin-joo, sister of one of An’s closest men, and the youthful recruit Dong-ha. Even if “Myeongseong” is effectively “Korea”, Seol-hee’s passionate intensity is quite surprising while her motivation is more revenge for her murdered mistress than it is saving the nation and eliminating Japanese influence. In this, her arc might not quite make sense in that her final actions almost derail Jeun-guen’s mission in putting the Japanese on high alert. 

But at the same time the film leans in far harder on Jeun-geun’s religiosity than other tellings on his story in which his faith presents only a minor conflict as evidenced by his offering an apology to God for killing Ito while justifying his actions as those of a righteous man in the courtroom. While placing him at odds with the left-wing ideology of other Independence activists, his religiosity is aligned with his humanitarian decision to release Japanese prisoners rather than execute them, abiding by the commonly held rules of war while his men are eager for blood. The decision backfires, but is depicted more favourably than in the narratively more complex Harbin and Jung-geun is otherwise an uncomplicated hero who makes no wrong decisions and never fails even if he is at the mercy of the Japanese.

As such, the musical sticks to the familiar beats of Jung-geun’s story from the Japanese counterstrike to his talent for calligraphy and the letter from his mother instructing him to go bravely to his death. Anchored by an incredibly strong vocal performance from Chung Sung-hwa who originated the role on stage, the film portrays Jeun-geung as the hero of the title, defiant to the end and thereafter wronged by the Japanese who buried his body in an unknown location and prevented him from ever returning home to a free Korea. It also glosses over the possibility that Ito’s assassination may actually have accelerated the course of Japan’s annexation which it failed to prevent and otherwise had little lasting effect. Nevertheless, despite its overt patriotism, the film does present the rousing spectacle of Jung-geun’s embodiment of the good son of the nation who fought hard for a liberated Korea he never got to see.

Hero screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Living the Land (生息之地, Huo Meng, 2025)

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When a way of life has gone on unchanged for centuries, the idea that it might soon disappear seems unthinkable, but change is indeed coming to the village in Huo Meng’s elegiac drama, Living the Land (生息之地, shēngxī zhī dì). Set concretely in 1991, the economic reforms and impact of the One Child Policy are beginning to make themselves felt, while incoming mechanisation begins to destabilise the rural environment. Farmers will always have to work the land, one utters in exasperation as a local man employs a large American tractor he says is capable of doing the work of a hundred villagers, while other young men decide it’s time to go south and seek their fortunes in the factories of a new era.

Even so, the film opens with a literal digging up of the past. 10-year-old Chuang’s (Wang Shang) great aunt has died, and his uncle and grandfather want to exhume his great uncle from the makeshift grave he was placed in after getting on the wrong side of the authorities so they can be buried together. Villagers talk cryptically about those who didn’t make it through the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, but otherwise continue living their traditional lives in harmony with the landscape. The irony is that Chuang is a left behind child whose parents are working away in the city, but the reason he’s not with them is because he’s a secret. He’s their third child and they can’t afford to pay the fine for violating the One Child Policy while his father works for the government and would probably be fired if they found out.

And so, Chuang is living with his maternal grandparents while his siblings are with their parents. The fact he keeps wetting the bed at a comparatively late age is likely down to this sense of rootless anxiety. He doesn’t know if he should say this is his home village because he has a different surname to the people he’s living with. While his grandfather plots out burial spaces for the rest of the family, he leaves Chuang out, and when the boy asks why, he says he doesn’t belong here because his name isn’t Li. He’s mainly been cared for by his aunt, Xiuying (Zhang Yanrong) but she soon comes under pressure to marry, especially when a wealthy local man takes a liking to her and her tentative romance with the local school teacher falls flat when he too goes south without her. 

Xiuying attends the regular pregnancy screenings on her aunt’s behalf to hide the fact that she is pregnant with an unauthorised third child, which is one way in which the village attempts to get around these restrictions imposed from outside which threaten their way of life and livelihoods. They need more children to help work the land, while they’re finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet selling wheat and bricks. Half of their wheat crops are destroyed when oil prospectors arrive with some in the village excited about the prospect of any being found, believing they’ll all be rich or that factories will open offering new jobs so the young won’t leave the community. But the prospecting leads to tragic consequences and seems unlikely to prove rewarding for the locals. 

When Chuang’s great-grandmother is interviewed by the authorities, she tells them that she doesn’t actually have a name. Before her marriage, she was just “third sister” and after that someone’s wife, mother, grandmother. The authorities don’t like that, and someone suggests calling her “Mrs Li Wang”, but there are a few of those already so she ends up becoming “Third Mrs Li Wang”, which doesn’t seem like a tremendous improvement. The lives women are continually devalued in the traditional, patriarchal community in which they are still chiefly valued for the ability to give birth, which they now can’t do because of the One Child Policy. Xiuying is bullied into marrying a man she doesn’t like, and then is mistreated by him because she didn’t bleed on their wedding night so he doesn’t believe she was a virgin likely because of the rough treatment she received during the pregnancy exam when they suddenly began to suspect she wasn’t a married mother of two. Chuang gets left behind again as the village slowly depletes and mechanisation forever disrupts this very traditional way of life, though the elegiac music suggests that even those who went south didn’t fare all that much better in amid the economic instability of the 90s reforms which destroyed not only communities and ways of life our very relationship with the land itself.

Living the Land screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

SAVE (생명의 은인, Bang Mi-ri, 2025)

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There’s an old adage that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for it, but equally perhaps some have come to expect reciprocity and the act of being saved places you into a debt you can never hope to repay. There are definitely different kinds of salvation on offer in Bang Mi-ri’s empathetic maternal drama Save (생명의 은인, Saengmyeong-ui eunin), but each of them comes with a cost both literal and spiritual in trying to draw lines in the complex interplay of guilt and gratitude.

As the film opens, Se-jeong (Kim Pureum) is being interviewed for a television programme about young people leaving care. The interview is being film at the hair salon where she has been working for the last few months in the run-up to graduating high school to prepare for “self-reliance”, but it’s obvious that one of her colleagues resents the intrusion and does not want to appear on camera with her. The young woman later rolls her eyes, claiming that she understands her circumstances but that’s she’s causing too much inconvenience, while her boss is unsympathetic when she’s distracted by the difficulties she’s facing and burns herself on a pair of curling tongs that she subsequently drops to the floor. 

Se-jeong’s friend from the children’s home gives up on studying at a university in Seoul because of the cost and goes to one locally instead, using the settlement money they’re given on leaving to buy designer clothes and telling her new classmates that she’s from a wealthy family to avoid the stigma of having no parents. Se-jeong has no such recourse, but it’s obvious that she’s bright and conscientious. She often has a notebook with her to jot down advice and instructions and is very thorough when searching for an apartment that’s within her means but ticks all of her boxes. Nevertheless, she is naive and has no one to help her, so it’s no wonder that she gets scammed out of her money by accepting an offer that’s too good to be true and falling for a landlord’s false reassurances that it’s fine to rent privately rather than through an estate agent because scammers only go for high value apartments. All of that does, however, leave Se-jeong even more isolated with no money or place to stay forcing her to rely on a woman who approaches her claiming to be the person who saved her from a fire at a home for single mothers in which her birth mother died.

Se-jeong wants to believe her, even if her friend advises her not to. Eun-sook (Song Sun-mi) too is after her settlement money, she claims for an operation to treat her lung cancer. “Can’t you save me this time?” She manipulatively asks, as if she meant for this debt to be repaid in kind. But Se-jeong has to wonder if she’s really telling the truth or is also trying to con her. Isn’t it a little too convenient how her “saviour” resurfaced in her life at just this moment?  Eun-sook can also be quite scary and knows a suspicious amount about how to manipulate social media and root out someone who values their reputation in the eyes of others and is on some level ashamed of making their money by deceiving people. In any case, Eun-sook offers the source of maternal warmth that Se-jeong has been craving while dropping hints about her birth mother and early life that further add to her credibility.

But on one level at least, Eun-sook doesn’t really want “saving” and isn’t looking for the same kind of salvation as Se-jeong who is looking for a new home while otherwise presented only with “self-reliance” and no other way to anchor herself in a society which is hostile to people like her and offers very little in the way of support. When she graduates high school, Se-jeong and her friend look on as the other girls take photos of their families with no one there to celebrate with them, except for Eun-sook who unexpectedly arrives to fill this vacant space. What she may be trying to do is save herself spiritually in saving Se-jeong, repaying an old debt and giving her the roots she needs to establish herself in adulthood. Her constant coughing is a symbolic reflection of her trauma from the fire that suggests she never really escaped it. Yet what she tells Se-jeong is that there’s no need for her to feel guilty. Her survival, just like their meeting, is just something that happened like fate or destiny, and she has a right to live her life to its fullest. Poignant in its implications of maternal sacrifice and intergenerational healing, Bang’s moving drama is infinitely forgiving of its flawed antagonist and suggests that, in the end, salvation is found only in saving others. 

SAVE screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Ky Nam Inn (Quán Kỳ Nam, Leon Lê, 2025)

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As related in the opening voice over, “ky nam” is a type of agarwood that only forms when the tree is wounded. The tree lets out tiny drops of a fragrant resin to heal itself that in many years become “ky nam”. It also, however, the name of a woman with whom the writer has fallen in love who has herself spent many years trying to heal the past, much as her nation is still doing as it remakes itself after years of war and not to everyone’s liking.

A slow-burning love story, Leon Lê’s Ky Nam Inn (Quán Kỳ Nam) is set mainly in Saigon in 1985 as a “red seed” nephew of an influential Party man is sent to live in a small housing complex while he works on a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The book has been translated before to great acclaim, but the new regime must have a new translation and it must prove as good as the old. Khang (Liên Bỉnh Phát) only became a translator because he was so impressed with the dexterity of Bui Giang’s language in the original translation, but now he must erase and surpass him because times have changed and Bui Giang belongs to the old world. When Khang and Ky Nam encounter him by chance, he’s been reduced to directing street traffic, knocked over by the hustle and bustle of the flower market as if time were flowing past him like a fast-moving current.

In her own way, Ky Nam (Đỗ Thị Hải Yến) is much the same. She was once a well-known writer with a recipe column in a magazine, but is now living a lonely life as a widow running a meal delivery service for her neighbours yet avoided by many of them because of her problematic background. Her husband seems to have died in a labour camp, and her younger son has gone “missing”. 1985 was the year when the highest number of people tried to flee the country. Young men could be conscripted for the war with Cambodia, and so Ky Nam sent her youngest away but there’s been no word of him since. Her surviving son, Don, wants to hold a memorial service believing that the only conclusion is that Duong did not survive the journey though Ky Nam remains confident he’s still out there, somewhere. 

Su, a mixed-race boy who helps out in Ky Nam’s kitchen, also wants to leave though in part because he is bullied, discriminated against, and made to feel like a burden by the family who took him in. His uncle refused permission for him to finish high school, and has arranged for him to become a part of another “family” to be able to emigrate to America. As much as he’s there as the new hope of the Communist elite, Khang also has his sights set on studying abroad in France and it’s never clear how long he will be allowed to stay in this transitory space between the new Vietnam and the old which makes his growing affection for Ky Nam all the more poignant. Like him, she is an intellectual well versed in French literature though now finding herself at odds with the contemporary reality. The French schools they attended have all been renamed, as the new regime does its best to erase the history of the colonial era.

Perhaps that’s why Khang is so drawn to her as he struggles with his own role in this society. He barely knew the influential uncle who engineered this future for him and is acutely aware that if his translation’s no good, everyone will say he was only given the opportunity because of his personal connections. Meanwhile, his uncle, Tan, has arranged it so that he won’t be given a key for the front gate and will have to ring the bell to enter the complex while the doorman and community leader will be reporting all his movements. Nevertheless, that doesn’t seem to have much affect on his behaviour as he settles into the community and continues helping Ky Nam even after it’s made clear to him that associating with someone who has a problematic background could negatively affect his standing. As someone says, Khang will eventually have to choose between career and love.

For Ky Nam, it isn’t that much of a choice. She knows this love is impossible, so she tries to refuse Khang’s help and keep him at arms’ length all the while yearning to hold him closer. During their final night together as they roam the streets of Saigon until morning, Ky Nam says she’s reminded of heroine of Camus’ Adulterous Woman who breaks away from her husband to escape to an abandoned fort by herself for a brief taste of freedom before going back to her disappointing life. Khang says he didn’t like the ending, but later wonders if Ky Nam were not like the woman, only pretending to have forgotten her gate key so they could spend this brief time together. He confesses, though, that he doesn’t know how to end his own story and is wary of disrupting the new life that Ky Nam has made for herself after he ironically helped her heal a rift with her judgemental neighbour which has allowed her to expand her business. He now is a kind of exile too, marooned in Hanoi waiting for passage elsewhere having left the apartment complex and along with it his rose to experience more of the world. Yet for all its sadness, there’s a joy in it too that this lost love existed at all and became the tiny drops that may one day save the tree.

Ky Nam Inn screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Jang Man-min, 2024)

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Money ruins everything. It eats away at even the most fundamental of human connections, rendering them all, in their way, transactional. But you need it, in the same way a vampire needs blood and it might be that the only way to get it is to suck it out of someone else’s neck. Or at least, that’s how it is for Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) in Jang Man-min’s familial drama Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Eunbitsalgu). 

At 32 years old, she’s still being held on a temporary worker contract with her sleazy boss, who is low-key sexually harassing her, using the prospect of full, salaried employment to manipulate her working life. She works “overtime” making posters to advertise other exploitative jobs, such as gig economy delivery driver, with the cheerful slogan “anyone can do it” which she later acknowledges is probably “insulting” to those who do actually do it and are fighting for proper pay and recognition. Secretly, however, she’s working on a webtoon about a vampire, which is how she works out her anxieties and what she actually wants to do and would be doing if money wasn’t getting in the way.

The particular way it’s getting in the way right now is that she’s won an apartment lottery and urgently needs to get the money together for a deposit. Jung-seo plans on going halves with her fiancée Gyeong-hyeon (Kang Bong-sung), but he seems reluctant to put the money in and is clear he won’t make up the shortfall when she’s turned down for the permanent position and won’t be earning as much as she hoped. All that’s left to her is the bank of mum, but her mother’s fed up with her always asking for money and claims she’s saving too with the hope of opening her own restaurant despite the fact that Jung-seo suspects the owner of the place she works at now is romantically interested in her. Perhaps like Jung-seo, she’s lost the ability to trust anyone after having a bad experience with Jung-seo’s father who left them for another woman and still lives in their home town with a new family. 

Jeung-seo’s father Young-joo may also have had artistic dreams in that he was once a saxophonist but gave his sax to her mother as security for a loan he never repaid. Her mother suggests she ask him for the money back instead, but that means opening old wounds that may be better left unresolved. Young-joo (Ahn Suk-hwan) is like a vampire himself, draining those around him of their cash to fund one harebrained scheme or another from stock market speculation to spurious property investments that he swears will pay off but almost never do. Gyeong-hyeon may not be much better in this regard, himself dabbling in stocks despite Jeung-seo making him promise he wouldn’t in a way that makes it hard for her trust him and suggests that men are always hung up on potential future gains rather than what they have concretely right now. 

Predictably, Young-joo doesn’t really want to pay up and insists on meeting Gyeong-hyeon first in and old-fashioned bit of patriarchal nonsense which makes even less sense considering how little of a father he has been to her for all these years. Gyeong-hyeong, meanwhile, is instantly taken in by him and has all but fallen for one of his scams. Maybe it makes sense on paper to abandon the city and live in an area with a lower cost of living doing a less prestigious kind of job like running a cafe which would lessen your financial burden and allow more “free” time to practise your art even if would still be a side hustle, but Jeung-seo knows better than to believe her father’s lies and knows full well that he’s only changed his tune because he overheard how much profit they could make with the apartment and thinks he’s entitled to some of it if he gives them the money.

But it’s not even like Jung-seo is asking for money from him. She’s only asking for money that actually belongs to her mother. Money ruined their relationship too, and it even interferes in her connection with her younger half-sister Jung-hae (Kim Jin-young) who idolises her but also frames her for stealing her mother’s savings after asking her to secretly sign a lease on an apartment she could use for her own art, music, and as a safety net in case her mother really decides to leave Young-joo this time when his plan to redevelop a building in a nearby town inevitably goes belly up. Joo-hee (Choi Jung-hyun) may have this in the back of her mind herself, which explains her coolness toward Jung-seo, fearing her sudden need for the repaying of old debts will destabilise their family and mess things up for Jung-hae. 

Despite the familial tension, being back in her hometown where Gyeong-hyeong’s spineless pragmatism is all the more obvious forces Jung-seo to think about what the apartment actually represents and whether that’s what she wants. Once she signs, she’ll be locked into that very conventional life which is what everyone in Seoul strives for, but might not actually be right for her. Her friend in her hometown, Tae-joo, has joined the navy for the financial security and will be able to get a military apartment when he marries. He’s given up drawing webtoons, and possibly also on his romantic hopes for Jung-seo. When she makes overtures towards him, he replies that he’s not ready to give up on his civil servant girlfriend, suggesting that he isn’t brave enough to break out of this conventionality either. Jung-seo is essentially in a relationship of convenience with Gyeong-hyeon that is not based on love but solely on the ability to buy the apartment which is what he really wants from her. The question is whether she has the courage to get off this train or is willing to settle for a life of dull humiliation submitting herself to the whims of her bosses while gradually abandoning her hopes and dreams to live in an apartment that is itself not a home but an investment in a future that will never really be hers.

Silver Apricot screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Brand New Landscape (見はらし世代, Yuiga Danzuka, 2025)

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Do we inhabit spaces, or do the spaces inhabit us? Yuiga Danzuka’s autobiographically inspired Brand New Landscape (見はらし世代, Miwarashi Sedai) situates itself in a haunted Tokyo which is forever remaking itself around its inhabitants like a constantly retreating cliff edge that leaves them all rootless and in search of a home that no longer exists. Some long for a return to the past and wander endlessly, while others defiantly refuse to look back and are content to let history eclipse itself in a journey towards an ineffable “new”.

These imprinted spaces come to represent the disintegration of a family torn apart by their shifting foundations. Ten years previously, Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) and Emi’s (Mai Kiryu) mother, Yumi (Haruka Igawa), took her own life during a family holiday after their father Hajime (Kenichi Endo) told her that, despite his promises, he would be returning to Tokyo to pursue a work opportunity. “It’s pointless to go back and forth like this,” he remarks with exasperation, making it clear that he’ll be going no matter what she says. Rather than simply being a workaholic, Hajime is a deeply selfish person who doesn’t much care how other people are affected by the decisions that he makes. He wants this opportunity to prove himself and acts out of a mixture of vanity and a desire for external validation through professional acclaim rather than the love of his family. He claims he’s doing this for them, that the opportunity will provide additional financial security and a better quality of life for his children, but Yumi replies that they don’t need any more money. All she wanted was family time, albeit within this artificial domestic space of a rented holiday villa by the sea.

Three years after their mother’s death, Hajime left the children to chase opportunities abroad and they haven’t seen him in years. Younger son Ren is now working as a floral delivery driver for a company selling expensive moth orchids. It’s on a job that he first learns that Hajime has returned and is holding an exbitiion of his work that includes the controversial Miyashita Park redevelopment project designed to fuse the natural space of the park with a commercial centre the exhibition’s copy describes as a symbol of the “new” Tokyo. It also, however, required the displacement of a number of unhoused people who were living in the park in order to provide space for upscale outlets such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci. When Hajime accepts the opportunity to work on another such project, a young woman on his team voices her concern. She asks him where these unhoused people are supposed to go, but Hajime says it’s not his problem. It’s for the authorities to decide. She asks him if he’s considered the effect taking on such a large project will have on their team when the company is already working beyond its limit, but he gives her all the same excuses he gave Yumi that make it clear he’s not interested in the needs and well-being of his employees just as he wasn’t interested in those of his family. “It’s pointless going back and forth,” he tells her while trying to sound sympathetic but really emphasising that his decision is made and nothing she could say would sway him from his course.

Maybe, to that extent, oldest daughter Emi is much the same in that she’s decided she doesn’t want to see her father and resents Ren’s attempts to force her into doing so. She’s about to move in with her boyfriend and looking ahead towards marriage, but also prone to “low energy” days like her mother and anxious in her relationships, fearful that like that of her parents’ they can only end in failure. Ren, meanwhile, struggles with authority figures like his ridiculous boss who tries to assert dominance by giving him a public telling off about the non-standard colour of his hip pack, and then yells at him that he’s fired only to chase him out of the building throwing punches when Ren calmly replies that shouting only makes him look silly. In the midst of the drama, another young woman states her own intention to quit, politely bowing to everyone except one particular man before walking out the other door towards freedom as if to remind us that there are countlessly other stories going on in this city at the same time.

There’s a moment when Ren is delivery the orchids that he just stands there holding them, like he doesn’t know where to go or what to do. He’s lost within this space and is unable to find his way back within a Tokyo that’s always changing. In an attempt to find some sort of resolution, he drives Emi back to the service station where they had their final meal as a family, only their mother’s chair remains painfully empty. A perpetually falling ceiling light hints at the unreliability of these spaces. It isn’t and can’t ever be the same place it was before and has taken on new meanings for all concerned. Ren stares up at the Miyashita Park development as if caught between admiring his father’s achievement, wondering if it was worth it, and mourning the loss of everything it eclipsed in building over the past with a “new” that will quickly become the “old” and then be rebuilt and replaced. Nevertheless, he has perhaps begun a process of moving on even if for him moving forward lies in looking back.

Brand New Landscape screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

3670 (Park Joon-ho, 2025)

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In recent years, indie films about North Koreans in the South have focused on the discrimination they face and how difficult it can be for them to integrate into South Korean society, not because of how different it is from everything they’ve known, but because the South doesn’t quite accept them. The problems of the hero of 3670 are, however, two-fold in that he is also gay and finding it difficult to straddle both communities while looking for companionship.

The opening scene finds him having sex with a guy from a dating app in a darkened room, but as soon as they’re finished, his partner gets up to shower and insists on leaving, refusing Cheol-jun’s (Cho You-hyun) invitations to get dinner and clearly uninterested either in friendship or romance. He asks him where he’s from, and on figuring out he’s from the North, rolls his eyes a little asking if he doesn’t have any gay friends yet. Cheol-jun doesn’t have any South Korean friends at all, let alone gay ones, and has never met any other gay people who left North Korea. He’s never disclosed the fact that he is gay to his North Korean friends or aunt living in the South who is his only familial link, which leads to moments of accidental insensitivity when his friends push him to date a North Korean girl they mistakenly think is interested in him, and his aunt tells him to settle down and get married in the South as his parents would have wanted him to.

The film seems a little ambivalent about Cheol-jun’s third community which is the Church. While it might be as Cheol-jun says helpful in a lot of ways in giving him something to belong to and helping with things like scholarship applications, it’s somewhat exploitative in that their help is obviously conditional on Cheol-jun accepting their religious beliefs which are otherwise in conflict with desire to find freedom as a gay man. Cheol-jun sometimes picks up extra money speaking at Church events in which he outlines how grateful he is to have been “saved” by the grace of God which brought him to the South away from the Godless North. Unlike other similarly themed films, 3670 doesn’t tread any further into how those from the North can be almost fetishised and exploited for their stories, but it is clear that that the Church is also using him to further their own aims. On the advice of his hookup date, Cheol-jun ends up attending a mixer for gay men which he keeps secret from his North Korean friends where he meets Yeong-jun (Kim Hyeon-mok), a gay man of the same age who lives in his area and shops at the convenience store where he has a part-time job, and later gets him a paying gig speaking about his salvation at his church.

Yeong-jun’s mother is a deaconess, and it seems that, in some ways, Yeong-jun is even less free that Cheol-jun who is beginning to discover a new kind of freedom as he introduces him to the gay scenes in Jogno and Itaewon. He views himself as inferior because he doesn’t believe himself to be conventionally attractive and has been having trouble passing the interview process to get a job (possibly those two things are somewhat connected in his mind). Yeong-jun also hasn’t said anything to his mother about being gay and sometimes goes to church to placate her even though he thinks there’s no place for him there as a gay man with the rather repressive religion that his mother practices. When he gets a job and is fully independent, he plans to stop attending church, making clear that for him, as a gay man in a capitalistic society, his freedom rests in financial security and achieving socially defined success by joining the workforce.

The fact that’s capitalism to which Cheol-jun must adjust himself is echoed in his advisor’s advice that he needs to market himself and give the university he’s trying to apply to a reason to choose him over another candidate. When he becomes a member of Yeong-jun’s friendship group, they also tell him that he needs a “selling point”, which they think should be his North Koreanness. But in an odd way, these ironic words of advice do lead to him becoming more at home with himself even if he’s also still caught between these two communities. With his North Korean friends, he dresses in a dowdier style, but puts on fashionable clothes and a university baseball cap to hang out in queer spaces with Yeong-jun. He tells his North Korean friends that he’s going to visit his aunt while occasionally blowing them off to see his gay friends, making it clear that he cannot exist simultaneously in both spaces as a North Korean and as a gay man.

But as much as Cheol-jun begins to find himself, Yeong-jun founders. Cheol-jun overhears some of his gay friends making fun of him for his North Koreanness and suggesting they only hung out with him out of pity, robbing him of this new community through spite and bitchiness rooted in a series of misunderstandings along with the social dynamics within the gay community and the friendship group itself. Nevertheless, when he does actually meet another North Korean man through the hook-up app, he helps him accept himself too by introducing him to these queer spaces in much the same way Yeong-jun did and showing him that it’s alright and it’s not as difficult or frightening to inhabit these spaces as he might have assumed it to be. 

Cheol-jun finds freedom here, at least much more freedom than he would have in the North. He’s not in the same kind of danger. But even many of the men in Yeong-jun’s friendship group are closeted and live as “straight” men, keeping quite about their private lives and restricting their authentic selves to Itaewon and Jogno, much as Cheol-jun keeps his North Korean and gay selves separate until he eventually decides to confide in some of his friends and finds them unexpectedly supportive because like him they too are here in search of happiness. The title of the film comes from a code Yeong-jun’s friends use to organise meetups hinting at their clandestine nature and desire to avoid inviting outsiders into their secure community. Cheol-jun, by contrast, is now free to wear his trendy clothes with his North Korean friends and to be open and unguarded in either community, effectively eliding the division between the two. Though his relationship with Yeong-jun who evidently meant a lot to him and changed his life in many ways may have been disrupted by the societal realities of the South from lookism not just in the gay community but the wider society to conventional definitions of success and entrenched homophobia along with the way they impact on a man like Yeong-jun, Cheol-jun has perhaps discovered a home for himself and a kind of freedom in his life as a gay North Korean man in the South.

3670 screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Hi-Five (하이파이브, Kang Hyoung-chul, 2025)

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If you suddenly developed super powers, what would you do with them? Would you start using them for good to save the people around you, or would you become obsessed with the power itself and try to amass more of it while your using abilities only for your own ends? Those at the centre of Kang Hyoung-chul’s superhero comedy Hi-Five (하이파이브) are firmly in the helping others camp, but they’ve seen enough movies to know that every hero needs a villain and there’s someone else out there who wants their power for themselves.

That would be ageing cult leader Eternal Young-chun (Shin Goo), New God Resurrected. Young-chun is just ripping his followers off and doesn’t believe in anything he preaches but has, on the other hand, started to believe in his own divinity. He’s been keeping himself in good health through frequent organ donations from less fortunate people to the extent that his body’s a kind of Ship of Theseus. His daughter’s fed up with his longevity and hoping he’ll finally snuff it so she can take over, which is why she’s after the five in the hope of taking them out before Young-chun can steal all of their transplanted organs too. It turns out that the pancreas he was given was taken from a superhero who took his own life and has not only rejuvenated his body but given him the ability to suck the life force out of other people to empower himself in a more literal way than he’s already feeding off his followers by exploiting their devotion to convince them to give up all their money and assets or else work themselves to death for free.

The other five commonly transplanted organs were given other people who are all marked with a tattoo and have been given powers of their own, though one of them hasn’t figured out what hers is yet. In contrast to Young-chun’s soullessness, each of the five seems to have had their own problems that are only impacted by their transplants rather than directly caused by them. Teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in) received the heart and is frustrated by her overprotective father who constantly asks about her friends though she keeps saying she doesn’t have any because she was ill for so long and had to skip school for treatment which is why struggling to make any new ones. He won’t let her do taekwondo either, though that’s what she most wants to do and possibly why she ended up with the all powerful, super speedy fighter skills. Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong), meanwhile, is a struggling screenwriter with an interest in the superhero genre. He doesn’t have any friends either, which may be to do with a poor career decision that alienated him from his community. Though he’s the first one to want to get the group together, he’s soon consumed by cynicism. Ji-sung got the lungs and can blow things away, but struggles to convey his emotions with words and gets into an alpha male hissy fit with Ki-dong (Yoo Ah-in), a super-sharp guy who got the corneas and can manipulate electricity but is actually a bit of a loser with gambling issues and similar interpersonal issues to Ji-sung.

Middle-aged yogurt lady Seon-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran) got the kidneys and can’t figure out what her superpower is but becomes the force who holds the group together. Even so, she’s battling mental health issues and some guilt about something that happened in her past and caused unintended harm to another person. Factory foreman Heel-han (Kim Hee-won) is a devotee of the cult, but frustrated and conflicted by the obvious disregard for workers’ safety and wellbeing. He got the liver, and can heal minor wounds caused by recent accidents. The reason he has no friends is that he cut off all of his relationships when he joined the cult, which is one other reason he doesn’t want to make a fuss about the abuse of workers and is originally flattered by Young-chun’s attention.

Nevertheless, it’s becoming part of the group that allows them to save each other and themselves figuratively and literally in combining their strengths to battle Young-chun, who is after all also sort of a part of them and a member of their family as another recipient of organs from the same person. Kang imbues their somewhat clumsy heroism with a quirky humour, even giving the occasional use of CGI a comedic, comic book aesthetic to lean into what might otherwise be a minor liability though production design and values are top-notch. It’s a shame the film was held up for four years by Yoo Ah-in’s drug arrest which has severely hampered his career and led to most of his unreleased work being shelved at the time, otherwise this might have gone on to become a fun movie franchise with deepening lore led by a likeable cast of everypeople using their powers for good in small but important ways. Still, just this episode alone is plenty of warmhearted fun as the gang come together to expose Young-chun’s vain and selfish cult leader for the conman he is, saving themselves and freeing those like them who fell victim to his lies.

Hi-Five screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

What Does That Nature Say to You (그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니, Hong Sang-soo, 2025)

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“But you’ve got your father behind you,” Junhee’s (Kang So-yi) older sister Neunghee (Park Mi-so) points to her sister’s boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk), meeting her family for the first time despite dating Junhee seriously for three years. But that’s not the way Donghwa likes to think about it, preferring to deny his privilege and insist that, as he does not take accept anything from his famous father, he’s an “independent” man. This notion is quickly squashed by Junhee who otherwise seems to have accepted Donghwa’s way of life when she admits that it’s more like Donghwa doesn’t like accepting anything from him, but will ask for money when he’s truly desperate. Neunghee subtly tries to remind him that whatever he might say about it, his life is only possible because he has a safety net and to insist otherwise is superficial and childish. But superficial and childish is exactly what Donghwa slowly exposes himself to be in Hong Sang-soo’s latest lacerating character drama, What Does That Nature Say to You? (그 자연이 네게 뭐라고 하니, Geu Jayeoni Nege Mworago Hani)

Donghwa is also, apparently, a little vain in that he needs glasses but doesn’t wear them so to him the world is always a little fuzzy around the edges. This might also explain why Hong films in low grade digital, much like In Water, rendering this otherwise idyllic mountain setting somewhat ugly and ill-defined. Donghwa wasn’t even supposed to be meeting Junhee’s parents today, which is why they sat in his car round the corner for ages after he drove her from Seoul before accidentally bumping into her father so he had little choice other than to stay. He said he’d come two years ago, but for whatever reason didn’t. Neunghee thinks it’s odd they’ve been putting off marriage, cautioning her sister that the “right time” never really exists and you don’t necessarily need to overthink these things, though increasingly she seems to come to the conclusion that the relationship isn’t strong enough because of Donghwa’s insecurities and Junhee’s lack of certainty. Junhee describes her as “depressed”, though Neunghee seems quite upbeat and though you could argue is basically doing the same as Donghwa in relying on her parents while she figures things out, seems to have more of a direction and self-awareness about the way she’s living her life. 

Though the initial meeting seems to go well and Donghwa bonds with his father-in-law Oryeong (Kwon Hae-hyo), he has a minor falling out with Junhee after she objects to some of his philosophical ramblings complaining that sometimes she thinks he waxes on about the ineffability of the universe in order to escape his problems. Oryeong later says something similar, that he spends his life evading things, while Jun-hee’s mother Sun-hee (Cho Yun-hee) laments that he hasn’t yet collided with reality and that’s why his poetry lacks substance even though he claimed to be a “poet”. When he says he likes the simple life and is wary of materialism, it’s difficult to know whether it’s a real position or merely an attempt to gloss over his lack of financial standing.

A now irritated Oreyong criticises him for not having his life more in order at the age of 35. Son of a famous TV lawyer or not, he doubts Junhee will be happy with a man still working part time at a wedding venue and as an ad hoc photographer on the weekends. Everyone keeps needling Donghwa about his old banger of a car, a Kia Pride from 1996 for which Oreyong thinks he paid too much seeing as it’s not old enough to be a “classic” car nor reliable enough for use as an everyday vehicle. Donghwa says he just likes it, before admitting that he doesn’t have the money for a new one anyway. The same goes for his recent adoption of facial hair with Oreyong criticising him for only doing it half-heartedly rather than going for the full bohemian poet aesthetic, though he’s likely done it to look a bit more manly and distinguished to gloss over his increasing insecurities about being the only son of a successful man who can’t escape his father’s shadow and still doesn’t seem to have figured himself out as an independent person.

Asking Donghwa what he likes about Junhee might not be entirely fair. It’s not as if love needs a reason. But his characterisation of her as an “angel” is also superficial, even if her family’s constant remarking on her upright character might be the same. Yet for all that, this awkward meeting filled with social niceties, and the wisdom of Junhee’s parents who think this relationship is not likely to last but know it’s better to let Junhee figure that out for herself, might be the collision with reality that Donghwa has been needing in showing him how childish and superficial his behaviour and lifestyle and have really been. Or at least, he’s beginning to realise they’re right about the car and maybe it’s time he set himself up straight if he is actually serious about his future with Junhee.

What Does That Nature Say to You screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.