Emergency Declaration is an action-thriller dealing with terrorism and contagion in a post-Covid world. It stars Song Kang-ho of Parasite (2019) and Lee Byung-hun of Squid Game (2021), arguably two of South Korea’s biggest acting talents in terms of being well known to American audiences.  The film opens with an explanation of an emergency declaration: when it is declared by a flight crew, that plane is given priority over all other flights landing at an airport due to the need of emergency personnel handling a situation as quickly as possible. What unfolds is a ..read more

Article proposals are welcome for an upcoming collection on Asian Popular Culture and the Gothic, edited by Li-hsin Hsu, Deimantas Valančiūnas and Katarzyna Ancuta. The collection is planned for submission to the Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies series.  Popular culture is often described as “the culture of the people,” containing cultural elements related to objects, beliefs, and practices that embody shared social meanings, and regularly produced for and consumed by mass audiences. As an object of investigation, it is mostly conceived of as a study of cultural product ..read more

This one day seminar helps educators teach students about Korean Cinema. In person and online, free entry & film screening. The global success of South Korea’s creative industries (Hallyu) provides an opportunity for the UK’s University sector to teach students about a culture they now regularly encounter through film, television, and music.  The event is blended, and unites an audience in Glasgow with others on Zoom. It aims to:  a) showcase the availability of Korean Cinema for UK educational purposes, including the Korean Film Archive’s (KOFA) online resources, and the London ..read more

Mai Nakanishi is a long-time horror film enthusiast. After founding and directing the Scream Queen FilmFest Tokyo and working on a wide variety of films in various roles, she made a splash with her debut film Hana (2018). It stood out as an expertly crafted minimalist horror film set almost entirely in an apartment in Busan and given depth by having a subtext about motherhood and career pressure. The film was screened internationally at over 30 festivals worldwide, from Osaka Asian Film Festival in Japan to Fright Fest in London, and won Best Short Film at the 2018 Monster ..read more

One woman’s greedy pursuit of movie stardom leads to a sticky end in Swallow, a 22-minute short from Mai Nakanishi. Winner of a Special Mention at the Generation XYZ competition at Tampere Film Festival 2022, Nakanishi’s film offers a grisly and gorgeous story that delivers a bite of body horror, a scintillating sequence of surreal imagery, and some ideas about our beauty-obsessed culture to digest. For such a short film, there is a lot on offer to delight the senses and intellect. Swallow is the Taiwan-set sophomore short from Nakanishi and it sees her return to horror of a female ..read more

Karmalink attempts to bridge science fiction speculation and religious beliefs. It presents the rather weird idea that there will be a time when science will be used to validate religious spiritual dogma, like karma, in the pursuit of “spiritual” knowledge. This speculative imagination makes us observe how such marriage between science and religion may affect how people perceive and practice both. American-born director, James Watchel not only bridges science and religion in a way that is seemingly unproblematic, but also ultimately trusts the audience to grasp the world he is presenting ..read more

Deceptively simple but quite profound, Melting Sounds is a moving and quietly funny first feature film from freelance designer-turned-director Kahori Higashi. In her work, she ruminates on the issue of mortality in a unique way: a patchwork family record sounds of everyday life in a small town to create a “sound grave.” This consists of a mismatched group of a young woman named Koto (xiangyu) an old man named Take (Keiichi Suzuki) and two others (Amon Hirai and Umeno Uno) recording everyday life on cassette tapes and burying them in the ground. The charm of the film is seeing how th ..read more

Melting Sounds is part of the latest wave of films associated with MOOSIC LAB, a competition wherein the titles submitted showcase up-and-coming directors who have created works that fully utilize the music of rising musicians. Like many previous films associated with the competition, the story muses about mortality but writer/director Kahori Higashi finds a truly novel approach to the subject-matter. She also utilizes the film’s musical artist xiangyu perfectly by tempering the sadness of the narrative with her cute style and electropop sounds.  It all begins on a quiet winter’s mo ..read more

Paid in Blood,  the feature debut of director and screenwriter Yoon Young-bin, is a crime drama that revolves around the battle for a new casino and hotel between two gangsters. Chairman Oh (Kim Se Joon), a retired crime boss in the resort city of Gangneung, has given majority control of his new project to his trusted underboss Kim Gil-seok (Yu Oh-seong). Young upstart Lee Min-seok (Jang Hyuk) who works as a debt collector and hitman from Seoul, has gained minority control through some violent means but wants to control it all. Confrontation between the two men is inevitable. The fi ..read more

Fatherless urban youth growing up in China’s seismic 20th century economic transformation is a common theme for many Sixth-Generation directors who started making films in the 90s. Beijing Bastards (1993) and Beijing Bicycle (2001), by Beijing Film Academy-trained Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai respectively, are just two examples. In the 2008 independent film Er Dong, Shanxi director Yang Jin picks up this theme where earlier filmmakers left off. But he adds a new twist by focusing on a teen trapped in his rural environment in the early 2000s, a time whe ..read more