SIWFF News
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all the filmmakers who showed their support and submitted their valuable works to the 28th Seoul International Women’s Film Festival.
This year, the festival received a total of 4,115 submissions from 125 countries around the world. After a thorough and careful review by the selection committee, eight films have been selected as finalists for the Discovery competition section.
We would like to once again thank all filmmakers who submitted their outstanding works and warmly congratulate this year’s finalists.
Discovery (Alphabetical Order)
The Discovery competition section, dedicated to first or second feature films by women filmmakers from Korea and around the world, received a record-breaking 462 submissions from 84 countries this year.
The selection process for Discovery was guided by a sense of anticipation for the vibrant potential and talent of women filmmakers from around the world. This year, a significant number of works looked back on the past, moving across different continents and periods of time. Many quietly revisited the 1990s and 2000s while reflecting on the negative affects of hatred, division, discrimination, and isolation that mark our time. Rather than remaining acts of simple retrospection, these films approached the past like adventurous cartographers seeking new coordinates. It was somewhat regrettable that there were relatively few works that experimented with the sensory possibilities of the medium, or documentaries that ventured into contentious issues at the forefront of contemporary debate. Nevertheless, we are delighted to present eight films that, amid both fear and anticipation, build intimate worlds of their own and move resolutely yet thoughtfully toward empathy and transcendence.
After extensive deliberation, this year’s Discovery selection brings us characters who reconstruct both their surroundings and themselves in the face of subtle forms of violence and seemingly inevitable catastrophe. These films invite us to imagine worlds beyond the frame and willingly call upon us to become active critics. We hope that within them, audiences will encounter remarkable moments that expand perception and thought and give shape to new forms of citizenship. We invite you to stand with these women as they forge their own paths amid the deceptions of media and rumor; to challenge invisible powers and seemingly inevitable forces alongside them; and, through cinema, to extend friendship and humanity toward those whose existence lies beyond even the realm of images.
We celebrate these emerging women filmmakers as they steadily build worlds of their own and invent new sensibilities.
Discovery Selection Committee
SIWFF Programmers SON Sinae, SONG Hyojoung