Oscar-Winner Youn Yuh-jung in Focus at London Korean Film Festival (EXCLUSIVE)
Youn Yuh-jung, who won the Oscar for best supporting actress in “Minari” earlier this year, will be the subject of a special focus this year at the London Korean Film Festival. The festival will be held as an in-person event Nov. 4-19, 2021.
Youn was this week named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2021.
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The festival’s special focus on her will include the European premiere of a digitally restoration of Youn’s first role in 1970’s “Woman of Fire,” by iconic filmmaker Kim Ki-young. Also presented in a new 4K restoration and being shown for the first time outside of Korea, is “Angel, Become an Evil Woman,” also directed by Kim, and originally released in 1990.
Courtesy of London Korean Film Festival
The festival includes two of Youn’s more recent collaborations with director Im Sang-soo, screening his “A Good Lawyer’s Wife” and “The Housemaid,” which played in competition in Cannes in 2010. It also finds house room for E J-yong’s 2016 festival favorite “The Bacchus Lady” in which her character dispenses mercy as a geriatric prostitute.
Youn also appears in the festival’s closing gala film “Heaven: To The Land of Happiness.” The Im-directed drama was invited to the edition of Cannes that was eventually canceled,. It was recently resurrected and set as the opening film of next month’s Busan festival.
The festival opens with the U.K. premiere of Ryoo Seung-wan’s action-packed true-life political drama “Escape from Mogadishu,” which is the highest-grossing film in Korea this year.
Other program highlights include the U.K. premiere of “Aloners,” the debut film of Hong Seong-eun, which won the Grand Prize at the Jeonju International Film Festival in May, and this month plays at the Toronto festival, and Lee Joon-ik’s “The Book of Fish.” The film is a sweeping epic about a scholar exiled to an island who trades his knowledge in Confucianism with a fisherman in order to write a book about the sea.
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