[SPOTV News = Reporter Kim Hyun-rok] The Jeonju International Film Festival, led by co-artistic directors Min Seong-wook and Jeong Jun-ho, will mount a special retrospective titled "Special Program: Meet a Slightly Unfamiliar Ahn Sung-ki."
At its 27th edition, presented in partnership with the Korean Film Archive, the festival will honor the late actor Ahn Sung-ki. Renowned for taking on numerous independent and art-house projects, Ahn embraced risky, auteur-driven work that helped push Korean cinema in new directions. The retrospective is designed to celebrate his restless artistry and enduring influence.
The program features seven films—six Korean titles and one international entry—spanning the 1980s through the 2010s, offering a broad view of Ahn’s range as an actor.
Bae Chang-ho’s Our Happy Young Days centers on two lovers who reconnect after years apart, only to face a tragic separation. Ahn stars as Yeong-min, delivering a layered performance that earned him Best Actor at the 32nd Asia-Pacific Film Festival. Lee Myung-se’s It's Hard to Be a Man is a workplace comedy set at Oseong Electronics; Ahn plays a product development manager who, after his boss’s sudden forced resignation, is propelled into change—symbolized by his throwing away the stack of resignation letters he had kept.
Moon Seung-wook’s The Stranger follows Kim, a taekwondo instructor living in Warsaw, who confronts a long-buried love and his own past after encounters with two people. In Shin Yeon-sik’s Fair Love, a solitary camera repairman meets a friend’s daughter to fulfill the friend’s dying wish, an encounter that quietly transforms his life.
Jeong Ji-young’s Broken Arrow dramatizes a controversial case in which a wrongfully dismissed professor threatens a presiding judge with a crossbow; conflicting testimony and missing evidence drive a fraught dispute over the truth. Ahn’s performance in the film won him Best Actor at the 48th Baeksang Arts Awards and the Korean Film Critics Association’s Best Actor prize (32nd edition). Jang Rul’s Film Era Love captures a chaotic moment on a film set when a member of the lighting crew, protesting the director, absconds with the shooting film.
For the international slot, the festival will screen Kohei Oguri’s The Sleeping Man, which revolves around a man injured in the mountains and probes what it means to be alive. Ahn’s role in the film marked the first appearance of a Korean actor in a Japanese production after Korea’s liberation, a casting choice that generated notable attention at a time when Japanese films were not yet broadly available in Korea.
The 27th Jeonju International Film Festival runs April 29 through May 8 on Jeonju’s Cinema Street and at venues across the city.
