2010 marked the London Korean Film Festival’s fifth anniversary with their biggest events to date but 2011 sees the start of a new era for the festival where they are striving to bring even more of the best of Korean cinema, past and present, to the UK shores.
Rosy Hunt attended DREAMS OF ELBIDI, a unique fusion of community theatre and traditional cinema. It offers not only a dramatisation of Kenyan ghetto life, but a way to entertain its African audience while educating them about HIV and AIDS. Also featured: transcript from the Q&A with Kamau wa Ndung’u.
Long Road student reviewers James Doughty and Jack McCurdy offer their thoughts on The Yellow Sea, which screened at CFF2011 and is also part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival programme.
Claire Henry reviewed YELLOW SEA, an “ambitious but very well executed bloodbath”, which was screened at CFF2011 and more recently at the London Korean Film Festival.
The villagers of Koundi in Cameroon have created their own communally cultivated cacao plantation as a way of alleviating their poverty independently. Turning away from typical NGO filmmaking, Ariane Atodji’s debut is a strong statement that Africa exists outside of the narrow, stereotypical lens of poverty, conflict and famine so often used to invoke it.
Rosy Hunt spoke to Simon Rumley and Bob Portal about THE LIVING AND THE DEAD and RED, WHITE AND BLUE
Rosy Hunt reviews Martin Bargiel’s short psycho-thriller AUGENBLICKE
Rosy Hunt reviews Gil Kofman’s directorial debut THE MEMORY THIEF, a character study in guileless, earnest obsession.
Rosy Hunt reviews this claustrophobic, clever take on the shuffling undead genre.
Amazingly based on a true story, THE POLL DIARIES plumbs the depths of the human condition using protagonist Oda as its main focus. Discussing rarely seen topics, the film uses the Baltic coast as a backdrop for Oda’s experiences in Poll just before the start of the first world war in 1914. An older and more knowing Oda narrates intermittently, providing hindsight to a beautifully crafted film. Naomi Barnwell reviews.
