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Event news: Jang Jae-hyun’s The Priests screens at Picturehouse Central

The second of the KCCUK’s teaser screenings for the 2016 London Korean Film Festival is on 2 June at Picturehouse Central. The screening also serves as a curtain-raiser for the annual Korean Screen Culture Conference which this year is held at King’s London.

The Priests (검은 사제들) + Intro

Director: Jang Jae-hyun, South Korea, 2015
Cast: Kim Yoon-seok, Gang Dong-won, Park So-dam
108 min | Cert.15 | Eng. Subs | Opus Pictures
2 June 2016, 7pm | Picturehouse Central | Book Tickets

Priests poster

After being the victim of a hit-and-run accident Young-shin (Park So-dam) begins to suffer from various inexplicable phenomenon. Prior to the accident Young-shin had been a faithful Catholic who attended church activities each week. She was close to Father Kim (Kim Yoon-seok), now a renegade priest shunned by the Church for breaching codes of conduct. In an effort to save Young-shin despite disapproval from senior members of the Church, Father Kim has been practicing exorcism rituals on her, without success.

Father Kim resolves to tackle Young-shin’s inner demon once and for all, but for this exorcism to be carried out successfully, Father Kim needs an assistant, someone bold and faithful. Deacon Choi (Gang Dong-won) is chosen by the church for this role. At the same time Choi is given a secret mission to monitor Father Kim and report any wrongdoings. Once the preparation for the exorcism ritual is complete, they enter into Young-shin ’s bedroom to begin the dangerous ritual…

*This is a special screening introduced by Dr Jinhee Choi (Kings College London). In this brief talk, Dr Choi will contextualise the film, The Priests, within contemporary Korean horror cinema (a shift from its usual institutional setting of high school to church/home), and its complexity in terms of the juxtaposition of Korean social, religious values as well as the heterogeneous spatiality of Seoul manifested in the film.

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

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