Special exhibit on actress Kang Soo-yeon to be held in UK

The London Korean Film Festival will showcase a special exhibit on the late actress Kang Soo-yeon. The Korean Cultural Centre U.K. announced on Thursday that the 17th London Korean Film would hold a special exhibit on Kang Soo-yeon and showcase 44 Korean films, ranging from horror movies and documentaries to independent films, to the audience in the U.K. The event will be held in London, Manchester, and Glasgow, Scotland.

The special exhibition will commemorate Korea’s world star Kang who died in May this year by paying tribute to her career in the film landscape. It will screen five movies starred by Kang, including “The Surrogate Woman,” for which she won Best Actress at the 1987 Venice Film Festival, “Come, Come, Come Upward,” which earned her the Moscow International Film Festival’s Best Actress honor, and “The Road to Race Track,” produced by Jang Sun-woo. Kim Dong-ho, former chairman of the Busan International Film Festival, and Darcy Paquet, the subtitle translator of the film “Parasite,” will join the event to reminisce about Kang’s trace that remains in the history of Korean film.

The festival's opening film will be the recently released movie “Alienoid Part 1” by Choi Dong-hun, and the event will end with the screening of “Hansan: Rising Dragon” by Kim Han-min. The two producers will also participate in the events to meet with the audience in the U.K.

The London Korean Film will also show “Broker,” helmed by the world-class Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, for which actor Song Kang-ho won the Best Actor Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In the section on Women’s Voices, “Gyeong-ah’s Daughter” by Kim Jeong-eun, the documentary “The 2nd Repatriation” by Kim Dong-won, and the independent cinema “The Hill of Secrets” by Lee Ji-eun will be introduced.

“Through this year’s festival, we wanted to commemorate actress Kang’s achievements and heighten the U.K.’s interest in Korean history by showing 'The Admiral: Roaring Currents’ and ‘Hansan,’ which tell the story of Admiral Yi Sun-sin’s naval battles, in the very hometown of Admiral Horatio Nelson, the hero of ‘the Battle of Trafalgar,’” said Lee Jeong-woo, the director of Korean Cultural Centre UK.


chaewani@donga.com