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Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Success at Locarno film festival

Don't Look Back

Kim Young-Nam has won two awards at the 59th Locarno film festival with his feature Don’t Look Back: the International Federation of Film Critics award and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema award. According to the Chosun, the film revolves around young people who try to stay optimistic despite poverty. Judging by the still from the KOFIC site not all of them are successful in staying cheery.

Here’s Davide Cazzaro, reporting on the 2006 Jeonju Film Festival over at koreanfilm.org:

the ambitious debut by Kim Young-nam, Don’t Look Back, served as closing film. This latter work deals with young generations in contemporary Korea. The director chose very good actors to portray three different sad stories of daily life and demonstrated strong trust in naked cinema (few changes in the shot scale, long periods of silence, no interest in camera movements). It is a pity that, as a whole, the movie ends up a little bit too long (126 minutes) and too flat.

No interest in camera movements: well, he was assistant to Hong Sang-soo in Woman is the Future of Man (2004), so some of the style must have rubbed off on him.

KOFIC mentions that this is Kim’s debut feature, which slightly contradicts imdb, which has Kim directing an earlier film, I can fly to you but you… Maybe that’s a short.

Despite Kim’s success at Locarno, the film has only managed to get shown on three screens back in Korea. The market over there is rather dominated by the Han River monster at the moment, according to Yonhap.

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