London Korean Film Festival, November 2016

In addition to the French Film Festival, the capital will also play host this November to the Korean Film Festival. This year the focus is on films made by women, and the festival will highlight the lives of Korean women through the eyes of female directors.

There are a whole range of films on show from hits of the past year to documentary and mise-en-scène shorts. The festival will open on 3rd November with female director Lee Kyoung-mi's The Truth Beneath. Below are some of the highlights (the full line-up can be found here).

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The Truth Beneath – Picturehouse Central, 3 November, 6.30pm

Lee Kyoung-mi directs this innovative film which tackles local politics as we follow a the wife of a politician as she tries to find her missing daughter in the wake of a local election. It's the unusual and interesting narrative structure and performance by Son Ye-jin which makes this film one of our top picks.

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Yourself and Yours – Regent Street Cinema, 17 November, 6.30 pm

Hong Sang-soo's interest in narrative form and structure is apparent in his filmmaking, where alternate events and outcomes are shown as equally real; his subjective side, more present in Yourself and Yours, focuses on psychological truths. This film tells the story of Minjung after she leaves the painter Youngsoo following a row, and we follow her in her attempts to start afresh. But what's really happening?

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The Widow – Regent Street Cinema, 6 November, 11.30am

This 1955 classic film by Park Nam-ok was the first feature film to be directed by a woman in Korea. We follow Min-ja, one of thousands of Korean War widows who refuses to obey the Confucian codes and remain loyal to her husband when a young man whom she likes comes along. Never deteriorating into melodrama, Nam-ok's story provides a rare female gaze into the lives of women in the aftermath of war.