London Korean Film Festival line-up revealed

The Day After and The First Lap bookend event.

by Amber Wilkinson

The Day After
The Day After

The London Korean Film Festival has unveiled the line-up for its 12th edition. The festival will begin in the capital on October 26, with Hang Sangsoo's The Day After and run until November 19, visiting Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow Nottingham and Belfast. It will close with Kim Dae-hwan's indie drama The First Lap, which charts the experience of an unmarried couple when they face having a baby.

The festival will have a special focus on the booming Korean Noir genre, with a retrospective stretching back to 1964's Black Hair and extending right through Nineties films such as Green Fish through to the present decade.

In addition to the latest Korean films gracing the world stage - including Between Seasons and Master - LKFF will also celebrate a selection of films from independent filmmakers, including a special focus on Jung Yoon-suk. His latest, Bamseom Pirates Seoul Inferno (2017) - about a grindcore punk band - also screened at London Film Festival.

Dr. Mark Morris returns this year with a Classics Revisited, focussing on 1980's veteran director Bae Chang-Ho, who began his career as assistant director to Lee Jang-ho (the focus of LKFF's Classics retrospective in 2016). Closely linked with the rising 'People's Movement' which campaigned against the authoritarian government, his first award-winning film People in the Slum (1982) echoes the issues of the people at that time.

Among the guests attending the festival will be Dae-hwan, The Day After cinematographer Jim Hyeong-gu, The Last Witness director Lee Doo-yong and Kilimanjaro director Oh Seung-uk.

Read our coverage here and for venues, dates and tickets visit the official site.

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