Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 305: Fri Nov 1

The Seashore Village (Soo-yong, 1965): Regent Street Cinema, 7pm


This 35mm presentation is the opening film in this year’s Korean Film Festival. This screening will be followed by a conversation between director Kim Soo-yong and Sandra Hebron, a film programmer, the Head of Screen Arts at the National Film and Television School and former artistic director of the London Film Festival. 

Korean Film Festival introduction:
Based on the 1953 novel by Oh Young-soo, The Seashore Village was one of the earliest successful munye (literary adaptation) films, a genre which would come to define much of South Korean cinema during the 1960s. Kim Soo-yong directed an astonishing 109 films between 1958 and his retirement in 1999, and during his most active period in the 1960s, regularly made several films a year. His 34th feature, The Seashore Village, was a collaboration with Ho Hyun-chan - producer of the legendary, now lost Late Autumn (1966) with Lee Man-hee - and honours the power of female compassion to overcome tragic circumstances. Through dazzling long shots, Kim Soo-yong brings the sublime landscape to life. The power of the sea and the mountains frames the story, set in a Korean fishing village, with human life and tragedy playing out as part of the wider narrative of the natural world. Women here are fierce, and yet care for and support each other. Their bond made more resolute through their shared sufferings, we witness an intense yet playful intimacy emerging between them.  

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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