Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today
When: Thursday, September 22 through Sunday, October 2
Where: Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
As they did last year, The Korea Society NY and the Museum of Modern Art again will be presenting a series of recent Korean feature films.
Yeonghwa, or “film” in Korean,is a good word for cinéastes to know, given the Korean film industry’s successat festivals and among critics and audiences worldwide. Korean film blendstechnical excellence, idiosyncratic individual expression, and anentrepreneurial spirit—filmmakers often write and direct their work, and bothactors and filmmakers benefit from the country’s homegrown “star system”—whileembracing a wide variety of styles and subjects. Korean cinema is generallymade for a national audience, so its vision is rarely diminished by compromisesin the name of global appeal.
This second season of Yeonghwa includeseight feature films, opening with Rolling Home with a Bull, by LeeSoon-rye (whose 1996 Three Friends was the first film by a female Koreanfilmmaker to be shown in MoMA’s New Directors/New Films), and Jean Kyu-hwan’sremarkable Town Trilogy. Enriching the exhibition are short works bymajor Korean filmmakers from Jeonju International Film Festival’s Digital FilmProject and a two-film retrospective of the late popular director Lee Man-hee(1931–1975), whose work has recently been rediscovered by a new generation ofKorean film critics. All films are in Korean with English subtitles. Specialthanks to Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, The Museum of Modern Art.
Further information, including titles, descriptions and showtimes, is available from The Korea Society or MoMA.
