Korean Cinephilia and Its Possible Futures: The 27th Jeonju International Film Festival

Korean film festivals, like the industry itself, have wrestled with an existential crisis since the COVID pandemic, with declining audiences and many filmmakers unable to secure financing for their projects. Even the most recent Busan International Film Festival, which celebrated its 30th anniversary with a much glitzier event than usual last September, still left attendees with the lingering feeling of being aboard a sinking ship, a fact not helped by a rather weak lineup of Korean feature premieres.¹  The 27th Jeonju International Film Festival, in turn, was the first in many years that did have more of a festive feel, even as the industry continues to struggle and the Korean Competition proved somewhat underwhelming. As a smaller event more focussed on independent and experimental films, Jeonju has been able to foster an identity beyond box office revenues and immediate industry fears (currently, the disruptions wrought by AI). A mixture of veteran indie auteurs and newer voices, this edition radiated a certain optimism for the future. 

Spring Snow

Part of that can be chalked up to an exceptional title: Jang Kun-jae’s sixth feature, Ji-chuk-ui Bam (Spring Snow), the best Korean film to premiere at a domestic festival since at least 2021, when Kim Se-in’s first feature Ga-teun Sog-ot-eul Ip-neun Du Yeo-ja (The Apartment with Two Women) played at Busan. A basic plot summary would seem to indicate this is overly familiar indie cinema terrain: two different film crews are shooting a low-budget film in the same area just north of Seoul (the Korean title translates to “Ji-chuk night,” a reference to the subway station where the action takes place), but the respective directors are former lovers, each telling their own side of the relationship. Given the cliched nature of this meta-structure, it is remarkable that Jang can create something that feels so original, with a depth of feeling and a level of abstract thought seen only at the highest levels of art cinema. One long take – shot in the back of a car while the couple argue and then engage in sex in the front seat, all while the crew is watching and filming in the background – is among the best examples of self-reflexive cinema I can recall. As viewers, we are made aware of the apparatus, and yet engage fully with the scene and its emotions, as this dichotomy of fiction and reality unexpectedly heightens rather than undercuts the sequence’s tension. As a bonus, Spring Snow is also quite funny, acknowledging the typically downbeat nature of indie films, as when a crew member observes that if the filmmaker is financing the movie himself that makes it his hobby, but one he does not seem to enjoy. This evoked much laughter from Jeonju attendees, who have likely felt the same way when watching so many dour festival entries. Unlike them, Spring Snow conveys a palpable cinematic joy, a true love for the medium, and testifies to the power that low-budget filmmaking can continue to exert. 

Frosted Window

Jang was not the only veteran unveiling new work at Jeonju. Kim Jong-kwan, who co-directed Dal-i Ji-neun Bam (Vestige) with Jang in 2020, also premiered his sixth fiction feature, Heu-rin Chang-moon Neo-meo-ui Nu-run-ga (Frosted Window). It bears noting that the film had already screened at the London Korea Film Festival in November 2025 and the Florence Korea Film Festival in February 2026; this was its first domestic showing. Like many of Kim’s earlier works,cFrosted Window is a triptych of shorts stitched together into a single feature, an approach many filmmakers eventually abandon but which has continued to be Kim’s preferred storytelling method. As a result, while his newest work is enjoyable and at times affecting, it does not feel like a step forward in the same way as Spring Snow. The film’s most challenging aspect is its tonal shift: over the three segments, Frosted Window moves from comedy to tragedy. The first episode, evocative of early Eric Rohmer shorts, is an autumn tale of a middle-aged playboy hitting on women in his neighbourhood. The second takes place primarily at a whiskey bar on a summer night, where a man in a relationship is trying to seduce another woman who only has eyes for the older bartender. There are hints of melancholy here, probably the dominant emotion across Kim’s entire oeuvre, but the mood does not take over until the last act, set in winter, which focuses on an actress suffering from memory loss. Notwithstanding its fragmented construction, Frosted Window holds together quite well, although it marks Kim as an artist content to work in miniature, using cinema to subtly explore emotional states rather than attempting anything of greater thematic weight.

The Summer That Slipped Away

As for filmmakers making their first features, the edition was not quite as successful. The Grand Prize in the Korean Competition was awarded to Lee Seon-yeon’s Heul-ryeo-bo-naen Yeo-reum (The Summer That Slipped Away), a deserving winner and the best of the section’s fiction films. The story follows a teenager living in a van with her parents after the family accumulates numerous debts and is forced to abandon their apartment. They now travel on the outskirts of the country, hiding from creditors and trying to survive doing deliveries. Both their situation and gigs are kept vague, which helps The Summer avoid unnecessary and clunky expository dialogue, making it all the more effective as a result. The film’s basic point is clear: these are people in a desperate situation trying to hold on to each other, familial ties that are deeply strained because of their circumstances. Lee wisely avoids any directorial flourishes, keeping to a simple style that eliminates non-diegetic music and centres on the characters and the ever-shifting spaces they inhabit. One is reminded of Kore-eda Hirokazu or the Dardennes brothers; while Summer does not scale those same heights, it remains a tense drama that develops real empathy for its protagonists. It may not be as strong as many other coming-of-age films from female indie directors of the past decade, but that’s partly because it has a different, less subjective approach, less concerned with individual psychology than social circumstances. Unfortunately, it was the only fiction film in the Competition that showed such promise. 

Karma

The documentaries were generally stronger, with Kim Myun-woo’s Hwi-saeng (Karma) the best of the group, winning both the Special Jury Prize in the Korean Competition as well as the Special Award for Best Documentary. Much of the film takes place in a beommusa (scrivener) office in the city of Daejeon, where a father and son run a business that helps people consolidate and deal with their debts, a problem affecting increasing numbers of Koreans (something The Summer That Slipped Away also dramatizes). Gradually, we learn that the son was once an aspiring poet and filmmaker (Truffaut posters feature prominently in the office) and is now working to help his father, who himself is crippled with debt and has been contemplating suicide (Karma begins by quoting the alarmingly high suicide rate in the country). As we go deeper into the family history, it is revealed that both his mother and grandfather had been Buddhist monks. The woman briefly left the temple, got married, and gave birth, but eventually returned to the faith and left her husband and child behind. Debt trickles down the family tree. The son’s maternal grandfather was himself heavily indebted, and built his temple by borrowing massive amounts of money. There is also the paternal grandfather, an elderly man who was exposed to Agent Orange while fighting in the Vietnam War, and has been dealing with the health consequences for decades, a victim of a kind of collective national debt South Korea accumulated with the United States in exchange for its inclusion in the capitalist global order. First-time director Kim does not offer these historical interpretations, however, keeping the story heavily personal and told from the son’s perspective, which essentially becomes his own. This limits the film’s scope, as a broader social perspective would have added richness to the text (the work of David Graeber on the history of debt, to give one obvious example, would have been beneficial).² But the family history is so compelling and moving that this remains a minor complaint. 

Ha Sinae’s Si-min-o-rang (Sandra, The Primate Citizen) was another strong non-fiction entry in the Korean Competition, although it too would have benefitted from a more analytical and less personal approach. The documentary follows the court case of Sandra, an orangutan at the Buenos Aires Zoo, who in 2014 was given legal status by a judge after a primatologist expert’s testimony proved that the ape’s harsh living conditions amounted to a violation of her rights. The testimony, together with footage of Sandra in captivity, make up the film’s most compelling parts, but unfortunately Ha gives more time to the judge and her personal relationship to the case, which makes The Primate Citizen dangerously sentimental and the legal process less convincing. 

Given that the best of the fiction premieres were by older filmmakers and that the Korean Competition was weaker than usual, this year’s edition might suggest that the future of Korean cinema is as bleak as several festival entries. Nevertheless, younger filmmakers whose new works screened outside the competition showed promising signs. The recipient of the 2026 Jeonju Cinema Project – an initiative through which the festival directly invests in a low budget feature, usually given to a director making their second or third film – was Kim Yong-cheon’s debut feature A Little Life, another coming-of-age film woven into a family drama, in which an estranged aunt has to care for her niece after her sister and her husband commit suicide (the thematic connections across all these works are not entirely coincidental). While his film may sometimes register as manipulative and overly melodramatic, director Kim has a good feel for the child actors, and the story is gripping despite its dark subject matter, which includes suicide as well as child abuse. To boot, one of the most exciting younger voices on the domestic scene even got his own mini-program. Centred on the work of experimental / genre filmmaker Park Syeyoung, a series titled “Everything Becomes Cinema” included the premiere of Park’s newest short film, Teuk-geun (after hours), numerous music videos and art pieces, and his most recent feature, Ji-neu-reo-mi (The Fin), a science-fiction work that premiered at Locarno in 2025. It was an unusual choice, both for how young Park is to already receive a retrospective, as well as for the type of genre films he makes, which would usually place him at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan). However, the intense cinephilia that transpires from his approach might explain why the Jeonju programmers would be excited about his films. Like the inclusion of genre filmmakers like Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho into the international art cinema in the 2000s, perhaps Park Sye-young and others can merge the indie sensibility of the past decade with a fresher perspective that can keep that aesthetic alive.³

Jeonju International Film Festival
29 April-8 May, 2026
https://eng.jeonjufest.kr/

Endnotes