Kim Bora’s acclaimed debut film House of Hummingbird (2018) has won the Audience Award at the LGBT Film Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It shared to accolade with the Finnish film Tove. 

Kim’s work continues to pick up awards on the international festival trail, three years after its first premiered in the New Currents competition of the Busan International Film Festival, where it won the NETPAC and KNN Audience Award. 

House of Hummingbird, which is loosely based upon Director Kim’s experiences as a teenager in Seoul in the mid-1990s, features Park Jihu as a 14-year-old girl who lives with her family and begins to navigate complex new relationships with people around her, including another young girl. Kim Saebyuk stars as a Chinese character teacher who befriends the young girl. 

Among the film’s dozens of high profiles awards were the Grand Prix for Best Feature in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Generation 14 plus section, three accolades at the Tribeca Film Festival (Best International Narrative Feature, Best Actress and Best Cinematography), the Grand Jury Prize from the Seattle International Film Festival and the Golden Tulip for Best Film from the Istanbul Film Festival.

The film was also a major success at home, where it welcomed almost 150,000 viewers in theaters, a huge number for an independent release, and earned numerous prizes from local industry events, including Best Film at the Buil Film Awards.