Korean Film Festival to feature women-themed Korean movies selected by Indian K-lovers

NEW DELHI: The Korean Cultural Centre India is holding a Korean film festival event in New Delhi for three days from November 28th to 30th as the Centre continues its marathon to commemorate the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and India. The film festival will be held at the India International Centre (IIC), a prestigious venue for art, culture, film, and academics in New Delhi.

This film festival will be hosted by KCCI with the cooperation of the Korean Film Council, the Film Festival for Women’s Rights (FIWOM) from Korea, and the local Indian International Centre. The criteria for selecting films were based as a result of a survey of local Korean culture and film lovers, focusing on topics of recent interest in Indian society, and the festival’s programs are designed accordingly.

The first day of the film festival, November 28th, is “Women’s Night” with the theme of women’s human rights, a topic of significant and widespread interest in Indian society. Three short films featuring women’s human rights will be screened, including <To My Unnie> and <Beyond This Place>, which won the Fiwom Award (Grand Prize) and the Special Jury Award at the 16th Film Festival for Women`s Rights which was held recently in Korea, and <Ullarivu (The Awakening)> which was submitted to the Mumbai Film Festival, one of India’s representative film festivals in this year. Along with the opening ceremony of the film festival, a video conference will be held with the Korean directors of each film after the screening of each film.

Kim Shin Ho, the director of <To My Unnie>, a film that won the grand prize at the Film Festival of Women’s Rights held in September this year in Korea said, “India, the country of Bollywood, is one of the countries I really want to visit within the next five years. Thankfully, my movie arrived first. I would like to thank the Korean Cultural Centre India for giving me this precious opportunity. Although the film is written in a different language and in a different environment, I hope it will reach many people in India. If you come to Korea someday, please remember the affectionate word, ‘unnie’.” expressing her expectations for participating in this film festival and holding a video conference with Indian audiences.”

Women, their human rights and social participation have been the topics of great interest in India for a long time. One of the noteworthy recent developments concerning women and their human rights in India is the finalization of a bill stipulating that 33% of the total seats in the Indian Lower House of Representatives, Lok Sabha, and state legislatures must be occupied by female lawmakers.

The first day of the festival, ‘The Night of Women’ was curated to convey a message of congratulations and support for the recent movements of the Indian society that strives to promote women’s rights by introducing Korea’s representative women’s rights films along with India’s representative women’s rights film.

On the second day, ‘The Night of Moon’ is to celebrate India`s remarkable recent achievements in space exploration technology and industry and send a message of support to Indian society and the government it is fostering the field with the screening of <The Moon>, a recently released movie in Korea which was selected through a survey of local Korean culture & Korean film lovers.

The screening work of ‘The Night of Outland’ on the third day is <Little Forest> which captures Korea’s food, countryside, and the community culture of simple country life like gathering ingredients such as vegetables and fruits, making and eating food, and sharing the cooked food together. One of the reasons why many local Korean culture & Korean film lovers recommended this work is that there is a sense of nostalgia for the countryside no matter how much one lives in the city and the other can be based on the recent increasing interest in Korean food in India.

Hwang Il Yong, Director of the Korean Cultural Centre India said, “We were able to see that local Indians’ love and interest in Korean culture and movies has deepened, and its individual tastes have become more diverse as we have prepared for this year’s New Delhi Korean Film Festival. We plan to further develop special programs to introduce and experience Korean movies while introducing and disseminating various Korean cultures in India.”