Korean Documentaries on Show at Prestigious Japanese Documentary Film Festival

Soup and Ideology 

This year’s edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), one of the top documentary film events in the world, has invited a pair of Korean non-fiction works to take part in the upcoming event, which will open its doors in October. Featuring in the International Competition will be Yang Yonghi’s Soup and Ideology, while Sohn Kooyong’s Afternoon Landscape has been selected for the New Asian Currents lineup.

A co-production between Japan and South Korea, Soup and Ideology finds director Yang documenting the life of her mother, a survivor of the Jeju April 3 Uprising in 1948, before memories of that time fade away. A second-generation Zainichi Korean filmmaker, Yang Yonghi previously participated in Yamagata with Dear Pyongyang in 2005. Soup and Ideology expands on the characters and themes presented in her earlier work.

Afternoon Landscape  

Afternoon Landscape is the debut feature-length non-fiction film from filmmaker Sohn Kooyong, who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The film follows a woman with a camera as she documents the landscape of Seoul. This marks Sohn’s second invitation to the festival, following his previous short documentary Winter in Seoul (2018), which also took part in the New Asian Currents program in 2019.

This year’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival will take place from October 7 to 14.