Category: Shorts

Director – Lee Gi-cheol – 1998 – South Korea – 15m
***

Master sergeant Kim tells the story of the framed scissors hanging on the wall of his barber’s shop – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

A barber’s shop: seemingly a place where one comes to relax and have a refreshing haircut and / or shave. That’s not really the case in master sergeant Kim’s barber’s shop, though, as he tells his clientele about the pair of scissors framed on the wall. Among his listeners, a man gets fresh with a compliant woman, feeling her inside legs up as the Sergeant proceeds with his tale of past torture.

The short just about holds the attention on the strength of its quirky characters, but it’s pretty odd, to say the least.

Scissors plays in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th.

Director – Jang Joon-hwan – 1994 – South Korea – 31m

*****

Born on the date of John Lennon’s assassination, a man believes himself to be the former Beatle – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

On the 8th December 1980, John Lennon is shot dead by Mark Robert Chapman in New York City. That same day, a child is born in South Korea. As the child grows into adulthood, he realises that he is the reincarnation of John Lennon. He grows his hair long and wears round lensed spectacles. Looking at him, you immediately think, John Lennon.

He tries to get record companies interested in his songs, but they don’t seem to grasp that he has the talent of John Lennon. Listening to him sing, and comparing the result to recordings of the first John Lennon playing on the soundtrack, neither do we.

His mother is confined to a hospital bed. He realises that if he reveals to her his true identity, i.e. he is John Lennon, then this would offer her hope and help cure her. This turns out to be a huge error of judgement on his part when he whispers the news in her ear, and she dies of shock on the spot.… Read the rest

Director – Bong Joon Young – 2016 – South Korea – 11m

****

Doesn’t anyone else hear those disturbing whines and explosions you do? – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

It took me a while to work out – or at least hazard a guess – that the central character here is a girl: the actress has one of those androgynous faces that you can read as either male or female, and the character’s garb if anything suggests a young man rather than a young woman. Perhaps that contributes further to the eerie narrative as the character starts hearing noises – a series of brief whines getting higher and higher, which presage later sounds like fireworks or bombs going off. But there’s nothing to e seen to match these sounds; only the sounds themselves, And the character appears to be the only person on the bus who can hear them.

Well, not quite. A man is wearing headphones, and when he accosts her and insist she tries them on, she discovers that they can cut the sound down to quite some degree.… Read the rest

Director – Lee Kwang-ho – 2019 – South Korea – 26m

*****

On their wedding day, a bride attempts to remove he groom’s memory of a previous girlfriend– in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

In a large van presumably on her way with her groom to the wedding reception, the bride has him rendered unconscious, so a device can be placed upon his head that will allow her, guided by representatives of the firm she’s hired, to tamper with his brain and erase what she considers undesirable memories, i.e. the memories of the previous girlfriend with whom he spent six years.

Her assistant has a handgun; she is given what appears to be a blue toy pistol. Entering her groom’s memories in this armed state, she is able to, for instance, enter a scenario in a restaurant and shoot at the woman who turns into increasingly large square blocks of pixels before vanishing from sight altogether. It turns out that the hardest image to erase is the final parting when they split up because this image carries with it more emotional pain and trauma than the previous ones.… Read the rest

Director – Lee Junggon – 2016 – South Korea – 27 m

**

Dating becomes a problem when your co-ed school implements a rule prohibiting physical contact between boys and girls – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

Seondeok Arts High School confronts the problem of co-ed schooling head on by implementing a rule prohibiting physical contact between boys and girls. Consequently, pupil Byung-chan is to be transferred to another school since he has been dating Seo-hyun for quite some time, causing the pair of them some considerable trauma.

Perhaps the school is intended to stand as a microcosm of wider society. Whatever it’s trying to say, at getting on for half an hour, this spends rather too long saying it and has a hard time holding the viewer’s attention.

The Distance Between Us plays in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th.