Welcome to the 17th Korean Film Festival!

The Korean Film Festival has been the most beloved cultural program since 2007 thanks to growing interest in the Korean film industry.

This festival is a very important event for us because the film is the platform that connects people beyond the border despite the different languages.

I would like to thank many people in Hungary who have shown great affection toward Korean films, making this event last long.

This year, the theme of liberation and renewal will be present in several of our films, whether it’s a hostage drama based on a true story, a gangster film, a mystical horror, an eco-documentary or an experimental silent film.

The opening film of the festival, The Exhuma, screened at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, is this year’s South Korean blockbuster, promising a special kind of horror with its own cultural traits.

In the Fresh section, we have, as is our tradition, selected the best films from the current Korean cinema line-up. The films in this section deal with phenomena that affect us all, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously, such as singleness, fake news and transgenerational trauma.

In the Faces section, which showcases some of the most prominent filmmakers in Korean cinema, you will see a selection of films by production designer Cho Hwa-sung. Cho is known for such acclaimed films as the neo-noir thriller Lady Vengeance, the political thriller The Man Standing Next and the disaster film Concrete Utopia, which premiered in Budapest last year. We are delighted that the filmmaker, who has won dozens of nominations and awards for his cinematic visuals, will be in person at the festival.

Selected each year around a specific theme, this year’s Focus section will focus on the increasingly pressing environmental problems. Thought-provoking and, we hope, inspiring stories about the protection of migratory bird habitats and the relationship between animals released from captivity but unable to return to the wild and the people who take responsibility for them.

The 2024 Extra section will take you into the realm of complex human relationships, with a variety of films in a variety of moods.

For the closing film, we offer an action-drama with exciting twists and turns, based on real-life events, in the hope that the tension and release we all experience will remind us of the irreplaceable magic of cinema.

I hope you will have fun at the Festival!

Hye Ryong Yu
Director of the Korean Cultural Center