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Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

LKFF 2018 Teaser Screening: Be With You

The plot of this movie, the first teaser screening for the 2018 film festival, makes me think of those yearning, understated love stories of the early 2000s such as The Classic. It’ll be interesting to see the genre re-booted.

Be With You (지금 만나러 갑니다)

Director: Lee Chang-hoon (2018, 132 ins)
Cast: So Ji-sub | Son Ye-jin | Go Chang-seok | Kim Hyeon-soo
25 Apr 2018 9:00 pm
Picturehouse Central | Book here

Be With You

The London Korean Film Festival Teaser Screening series returns this year with the European Premiere of fantasy drama Be With You, based on Japanese author Takuji Ichikawa’s bestselling novel of the same name. Lee Chang-hoon’s directorial debut takes us on a heart-wrenching journey deep into sunaebo, the type of pure and eternal love lying at the core of countless Korean and Japanese melodramas of the kind; yet is perhaps a concept less familiar to the Western eye.

While Woo-jin (So Ji-sub, Rough Cut) mourns the passing of his beloved wife Soo-a (Son Ye-jin, The Truth Beneath), their young son, seven-year-old Ji-ho, holds unfailingly onto his mother’s vow to return when the next rainy season breaks. Ji-ho’s unflinching faith in his mother’s words prove not in vain; miraculously a year later the three are reunited on that promised first day of the rainy season. The woman who appears once again before Woo-jin and Ji-ho looks no different to the one lost to them just a year before. Yet Soo-a has no memory, not of the husband, nor the son whom she once treasured so dearly.

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