ACF 1147: "Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today" coming to MoMA

 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

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 success at festivals and among critics and audiences worldwide. Korean film blends technical excellence, idiosyncratic individual expression, and an entrepreneurial spirit—filmmakers often write and direct their work, and both actors and filmmakers benefit from the country’s homegrown “star system”—while embracing a wide variety of styles and subjects. Korean cinema is generally made for a national audience, so its vision is rarely diminished by compromises in the name of global appeal.

This second season of Yeonghwa includes eight feature films, opening with Rolling Home with a Bull, by Lee Soon-rye (whose 1996 Three Friends was the first film by a female Korean filmmaker to be shown in MoMA’s New Directors/New Films), and Jean Kyu-hwan’s remarkable Town Trilogy. Enriching the exhibition are short works by major Korean filmmakers from Jeonju International Film Festival’s Digital Film Project 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 of Korean film critics. All films are in Korean with English subtitles. Special thanks 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.