LKFF 2012

Film Festival Highlight: Eungyo – A poet looks into his glass

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by Philip Gowman on 19 November, 2012

in Film | Film reviews and comment | London Korean Film Festival

Korea’s most famous poet, Lee Jeok-yo, is well into old age. He has taken as a student cum in-house assistant an aspiring but not very talented novelist called Seo Ji-woo. A neighbouring high school girl starts takes a cleaning job at the poet’s house, and a connection soon forms between the poet and the young […]

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Festival Film Review: Masquerade deserved all the awards it got

by Philip Gowman 18 November 2012
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It swept the board at the recent Grand Bell awards – best film, best director and best leading actor among them. And for all-round entertainment, the closing film of the London Korean Film Festival 2012 deserved all those awards. Was a uniquely reformist tax policy set by a pantomime performer who was pretending to be […]

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Festival Film Review: Spring Snow — on the value of the priceless

by Shouvik Datta 16 November 2012
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Spring Snow, the final film of this year’s London Korean Film Festival, was shown at London’s ICA on November 11. The film falls into a Korean tradition of documentary drama films such as Lee Man-hee’s A Day Off. Kim Soon-ok, played very well by Yoon Suk Hwa (윤석화), is an aging mother and wife. She […]

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Festival Film Review: All about my wife – a perfect date movie

by Philip Gowman 11 November 2012
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Part of the K-comedy stream of the 2012 LKFF. Im Soo-jeong plays a shrewish wife driving her husband (Lee Seon-gyoon) crazy, causing him to hire a Casanova (Ryu Seung-ryong) to woo her to give him an excuse for divorce. This is a perfect date movie: entertaining, never too demanding but still making you think about […]

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Festival Film Review: The Grand Heist – a lightweight, fun caper movie, but not for grown-ups

by Philip Gowman 11 November 2012
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If films require a minimum age classification so that youngsters are not harmed by seeing adult material, shouldn’t there also be a maximum age classification system to warn adults that they are going to be watching material designed for juveniles? If The Grand Heist, billed as a Joseon dynasty Ocean’s Eleven1, had such a classification, […]

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Festival Film Review: One Deranged hour of my life that I will never get back

by Philip Gowman 10 November 2012
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Sometime you go into a movie not knowing what to expect and come out feeling fulfilled. Sometimes you go into a movie with high expectations and come out feeling disappointed. If I find a movie dragging, I’ll usually give it a chance to pick up. But when I really can’t see that the film is […]

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White Night pulled from LKFF 2012 programme

by Philip Gowman 9 November 2012
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Sadly White Night (백야, LeeSong Hee-il 2012), the only queer-themed film on LKFF programme this year, has been pulled at the last minute. According to Otherwhere, the 70 minute feature was inspired by the real life case of a homophobic street assault. The film, which first showed at the Jeonju International Film Fest in April […]

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Festival Film Review: Gabi – a glossy period spy movie with plenty to recommend it

by Philip Gowman 9 November 2012
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This year’s Korean Film Festival has a focus on period film – the closing gala is Masquerade, and we also have The Grand Heist, I am the King, and Gabi. Gabi is set in the last decade of the 19th Century, at a time when the Japanese and the Russians were competing for influence in […]

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Festival Film Review: The Thieves – an exhilarating start to LKFF 2012

by Philip Gowman 3 November 2012
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What can one say about one of the most popular Korean films ever? It’s slick, it’s got Jeon Ji-hyun and Kim Hye-su; it’s got Lee Jeong-jae, Kim Yun-seok and even Hong Kong megastar Simon Yam. Yes, it’s a real pleasure to combine in one film some of your favourite Korean eye-candy with a couple of […]

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The LKFF 2012 Programme

by Events Editor 20 October 2012
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Here’s the schedule for the London Korean Film Festival 2012. And below the listing is the official press release to give you a flavour of the thinking behind the line-up. (All dates are November 2012). Thanks to Paul Quinn at Hangul Celluloid for doing a lot of the heavy lifting fishing out run times and […]

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