Monday 11 November 2019, 15.00–17.15
BP Lecture Theatre

Ticket link: http://koreanfilm.co.uk/site/film-festival-2019/womens-voices/yukiko

The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) is the UK’s leading showcase of Korean cinema and, with over 60 titles on offer, is one of the largest festivals dedicated to a national cinema in the world.

Now in its groundbreaking 14th edition, LKFF celebrates 100 years of rich and vibrant national films in its special focus: A Century of Korean Cinema - and returns to the British Museum with an essay documentary screening and discussion event.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Young Sun Noh.

Yukiko / 유키코
Director: Noh Young Sun
Writer: Noh Young Sun
Producer: Carine Chichkowsky
With: Jang Yeo-jung, Ishikawa Yuko
Production company: Survivance
International sales: Survivance
Documentary / 2018 / 70 min / cert. 15 / colour
Korean, Japanese, with English subtitles

Framed by the question “Can you mourn for a person of whom you have no memory?”, Noh Young Sun’s first documentary feature tells a heartbreaking story of absence and loss rooted in the turmoil of the Korean War. Now living in France, far from her mother, Noh reaches one generation back to solve the mystery of ‘Yukiko’, her unknown Japanese grandmother who went back to Tokyo shortly after giving birth to the daughter of her Korean lover in 1950s Pyongyang.

The lives of the three women intertwine in this well-constructed first-person film as the archival footage accompanying a forbidden wartime love story gives way to poetic shots of the windswept surroundings of Noh’s mother’s house. During the director’s visit to the care home her in which her grandmother died, on the Japanese island of Okinawa, a local woman re-enacts her own family’s traumatic history, pointing to the bigger picture which envelops individual narratives.

Young Sun Noh (b. 1979, Seoul) has lived and worked in France for 12 years. During her studies in Grenoble Art School in France, she developed video art practice. Her interest and passion for experimental and documentary cinema led her to study at the Documentary Film School in Lussas. Her student short documentary Prune Sauvage won the Grand Prix at Festival Doc En Courts in Lyon in 2014. She also regularly works as a film editor. Yukiko is her first feature-length documentary and had its world premiere in Mid Length Competition at IDFA.