Last year’s successful event brought the widest possible range of Korean independent films and video to Tokyo: from narrative fiction to documentary, from animation to avant-garde, from student work to the most sophisticated computer-generated images. You were kind enough to tell us that you liked what you saw, so here’s another week of outstanding, ground-breaking work, most of it produced within the last year. Fans of “Yon-sama” won’t find much to please them here, but there’s plenty to surprise and delight everyone else. (And it’s all subtitled in English as well as Japanese.)

Everyone knows that independent film-makers have a hard time getting their work financed, distributed and screened. These events at Image Forum are designed to draw attention to talents whose future depends on -- and deserves -- your interest. But there’s also a larger motive behind this year’s selection. Mainstream Korean movie-making has been so popular at home and abroad in the last couple of years that the independent sector has been almost totally eclipsed. We start from the presumption that the indies are actually better than the mainstream:  smarter, funnier, sexier, scarier.  More engaging.  More rewarding.

As you’ll see, our selection this time includes four indie features, two portmanteau projects and three programmes of shorts.  Once again, the range couldn’t be wider. We have a mystery thriller with a sharp political undertow, a strange fantasy about the desires and frustrations of children (it has echoes of Terayama Shuji and Miyazaki Hayao), funny/sad accounts of gay experience, and a hilarious deconstruction of the logic of consumerism. We have video-letters exchanged between elderly sisters in Korea and Los Angeles, some disturbing alpha-male violence in a men’s room, and a seriously provocative essay on the lessons to be learned from history. Oh, and some truly knockout animation.  Come see!

Tony Rayns
(London-based film-maker/critic,　programmer of Korean Independent Cinema 2005)