16th Korean Film Festival in Budapest in October

The 16th Korean Film Festival will be held in Budapest from October 13 to 20, with twenty-four fresh South Korean films and audience meetings, including the Oscar-nominated 'Past Lives', which will be released in Hungarian cinemas next year, the organizers told MTI on Friday.

As they underline in their statement, this year's festival will also offer the opportunity to meet two filmmakers in person. The director Hee-jung Kim, who studied at the Seoul Institute of Art and the Polish National Film School, will be in attendance on Saturday, October 14, while the main actress Ha-seon Park, who is known as the queen of the 'Dong Yi' series, will be in the spotlight on Sunday, October 15.

The opening film of the festival is Kim Hee-jung's 'Where would you like to go?' 2023, in which the director, as in his previous films, deals with a serious life event and the altered perception of reality that results from it. It tells the story of the grieving process of a woman widowed by a sudden tragedy, from denial to finding a new perspective.

In their statement, the organizers point out that the Faces section, which will showcase outstanding representatives of Korean cinema, will also include two other films by the director. 'Snow paths' shows the struggle of an alcoholic who tries to stay sober with the help of a nun, and with whom he comes close in unusual states of consciousness. The film has been selected for the Karlovy Vary and Gothenburg International Film Festivals, among others. 'A French Woman', the story of a newly divorced woman struggling with belonging, who returns home after twenty years abroad, was the winner of the Pusan International Film Festival three years ago.

The recent Korean blockbuster Fresh section also included a South Korean musical romantic comedy ('Killing Romance') and an action thriller based on a true story ('The point men'). The latter film is based on the 2007 hostage drama in Afghanistan, in which a group of South Korean missionaries were taken hostage by the Taliban, the release said. Also included in the selection is the latest fighter-cop action-thriller 'The Roundup: No Way Out', in which the detective 'Ma' played by Ma Dong-seok, or Don Lee, in his Western stage name, smashes his way through the underworld. Also on the block is the historical drama 'The Birth', about St. Andrew Kim, the first Korean Catholic priest and the first Korean Christian martyr, which will take viewers on the life of Korea's patron saint.

Focus, which focuses on a specific theme each year, this year includes a selection of films from different genres, all of which are about how we treat each other, whether in the family or at work. Here you can see the critically acclaimed study of exploitation in the workplace, 'Next Soheey', which not only won the Korean Film Critics Association awards but also became the first Korean closing film at Cannes. The film, which explores the stressful Asian work culture, is based on a true story of a suicide.

Also shown in Budapest for the first time is the Oscar-nominated 'Past Lives', which was screened in competition at this year's Sundance Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival. The festival will close with 'Concrete Utopia', a disaster thriller that premiered in South Korea two months ago, which will give fans of Korean cinema the thrill of conflict and relationships unfolding in a world on the brink of global destruction.