서울국제여성영화제

As part of the festival's ongoing program dedicated to rediscovering, together with contemporary audiences, women in film who have carved out a distinctive place in Korean cinema, this year's festival presents a retrospective on Kim Ji-mee, who passed away in late 2025. Taking place after the screening of Ticket (1986) and before The Tiger Moth (1965), this conversation brings together director Kim Hong-joon and film critic Cho Hye-jung to explore Kim Ji-mee's multifaceted career as an actor, film producer, and leading figure in Korean cinema, and the forms of femininity through which she brought the gender contradictions of Korean society into sharp relief while transforming them.

Produced by Chang, the film club of Another Culture, The Accessories (1986), and Even Little Grass Has Its Own Name (1990), co-produced by Korean Womenlink and the women's film collective Bariter, offer distinct perspectives on the realities faced by women office workers in the 1980s. Following the screening, Byun Jairan, producer of The Accessories, and Kim Soyoung, director of Even Little Grass Has Its Own Name, discuss how women utilized film and video to reveal gender discrimination and the contradictions of their working lives, as well as the process and significance of collective filmmaking at the intersection of the women's and film movements.

Barbara Hammer (1939–2019), a feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, spent more than 50 years, beginning in 1968, creating over 90 works that inscribed bodies, intimacy, history, and desire onto film, challenging the taboos that rendered women and lesbian sexuality invisible. From her groundbreaking film Dyketactics (1974)—widely considered the first lesbian film—to Nitrate Kisses (1992), which brought forgotten queer histories back to life on film, and her final work Evidentiary Bodies (2018), this lecture examines her radicalized feminist aesthetics, focusing on the concepts of "haptic visuality" and "the ephemeral archive" that run throughout her work.

Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess radically reimagines the story of Countess Báthory through the intersecting themes of women’s desire, power, and aging. Film critic Kwon Eun-sun and Chung Chungyeop, a leading figure in Korean feminist art, explore how Ottinger revisits a historical figure who has come down through history and legend as a vampire and a “villainess.” Together, they delve into Ottinger’s distinctive visual imagery and camp aesthetics, rooted in her beginnings as a painter, as well as the subversive ways in which her work challenges genre convention and patriarchal norms. The conversation also looks back on the relationship between SIWFF and Ottinger, while exploring with the audience the imaginative possibilities of feminist art across screen and canvas.

Hamano Sachi entered the film industry in 1968 as an assistant director on independent films, and after making her directorial debut in pink cinema in 1971, she went on to make numerous low-budget films. Working from a woman's perspective, she has also authored books including When a Woman Makes a Film (2005) and A Profession That Won't Let You Be a Woman: How I Made Over 300 Films (2023). This program invites audiences to look back on Hamano Sachi's nearly sixty-year filmmaking journey.

* Korean and Japanese interpretation will be provided.

Director Lee Kyoung-mi introduced one of the most distinctive and unapologetically unlikeable female characters in Korean cinema with her feature debut, Crush and Blush (2008). Celebrating the 30th anniversary of her debut this year, makeup artist SONG Jong-hee has shaped some of the most memorable faces in Korean cinema, from Affliction of Man (1995) and Lady Vengeance (2005) to Eungyo (2012), The Handmaiden (2016), and The King's Warden (2026). Longtime creative collaborators since //Crush and Blush/, the two have continued their partnership on The Truth Beneath (2016), "Love Set" from Persona (2019), and the series The School Nurse Files (2020). Together, they discuss the process of bringing women characters who defy social conventions to the screen, and the collaboration between directing and makeup in shaping cinematic characters.