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Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

A surprise Korean film festival (the KCC’s first)

The cinema’s booked, the distributors have agreed to release their valuable prints, and now, with precision-honed timing and a week to go, the well-oiled marketing machine swings into action. The BAKS and PACSF lists are peppered, other private mailing lists barraged, but whether it makes the Time Out copy deadline, who knows. And so it is that we are informed of a surprise Korean film festival next week. The festival, organised by the Korean Cultural Centre, an offshoot of the embassy, runs from 27 September 2006 to 1 October 2006 at Odeon Covent Garden, Shaftesbury Avenue. All showings are free, but turn up early as I am informed that there are only 150 seats and it’s first come first served.

Wlcome to Dongmakgol

Apologies for the short notice: as ever, it would have been nice to have known at least the vague dates a month or so in advance. I only found out earlier this week that something was happening at an unspecified but relatively imminent occasion, and although I emailed the organiser for details I had to find out the programme via BAKS (KACC had been coralled into assisting with publicity). The website, www.koreafilm.co.uk, is under construction at the time of writing this. With luck it should be up soon.

Here we go (links are to reviews on Darcy’s site):

Wednesday 27th Sep

Thursday 28th Sep

Friday 29th Sep

  • Bravo, My Life (10:15)
  • Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (23:10)

Saturday 30th Sep

  • Oseam (anime) (10:15)
  • Hammer Boy (anime) (12:00)
  • Shark Bait (anime) (13:45)
  • Pororo to the Cookie Castle (anime) (15:30)
  • Crying Fist (23:10)

Sunday 1st Oct

  • Shark Bait (anime) (10:15)

Not a bad haul of films, though I can’t vouch for the anime. Pity that there’s very little to watch at prime-time. Not sure that I’ll be able to make any of these, but many thanks are due to the Korean Cultural Centre for their efforts.

As usual, I’ve loaded these onto my events calendar.

Update (22 Sept): There’s an ad in the current edition of Time Out (page 87). Note the proliferation of sponsors: Korean Air, Think Korea 2006, KOFIC (the Korean Film Council) KOCCA (the Korea Culture & Content Agency), MCT (Ministry of Culture & Tourism), the Korean Embassy, and last but not least the Korea Cultural Centre.

And by heroic efforts Jase managed to get the first day’s films into the listings page of the current issue of Time Out (page 74). Thanks also to Christine for publicising the festival on the BBC film forums (and for giving my site a nice write-up).

(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.

3 thoughts on “A surprise Korean film festival (the KCC’s first)

  1. Looks fantastic, will definitely be checking this out although i just received my mass order from yesasia including welcome to dongmakgol, ????, ????, Holiday, ???? ???, rpoint and ??? ??? and a few others..

    Still life is indeed full of surprises as they say..

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