Colony (2026)

July 26th saw the conclusion of this year's New York Asian Film Festival, which is often a showcase for South Korean film. Right from the jump, spectators were able to catch a glimpse of the South Korean cineplex with Colony (2026), the opening film of the festival and the latest from director Yeon Sang-ho, the director best known for Train to Busan (2016) though he is also responsible for other such cerebral works as The King of Pigs (2011) and Hellbound. Like Train to Busan, Colony depicts an infection gone out of control in a way that was smart enough to wow the audiences at the Cannes Film Festival while being intensely crowd-pleasing enough to score the biggest local opening at the South Korean box office this year.

Hope (2026)

The New York Asian Film Festival is a kind of intermediate ground between those two worlds. Director Na Hong-jin himself appeared at the New York Asian Film Festival to accept the Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. His contributions are not to be underestimated. Despite his work principally being in the domain of that generally low-brow genre, all of Na Hong-jin's films have appeared at the Cannes Film Festival. This includes his newest feature Hope (2026), about an extraterrestrial encounter near the Demilitarized Zone. Featuring Hollywood actors, Hope is a notable proof of concept for the frequent international scope of South Korea's film offerings today, the country now receiving and sending out many foreign influences.

As might be expected, it's much easier to run Hollywood films in South Korea than it is the other way around. This is how the New York Asian Film Festival is able to fulfill an important cultural mission. As the New York Asian Film Festival runs in the largest city in the United States, there's a certain sort of mass appeal for any film that plays there, but it's also a spotlight for Asian films that may struggle to receive domestic distribution in the United States, despite having strong cinematic qualities. It's little surprise given this context that Colony was able to secure the berth opening the festival, with its new core innovative quality being that the apparently undead entities possess a collective intelligence, adding an explicitly cerebral sci-fi element to a genre that isn't always about the finer philosophical points.

Train to Busan (2016)

Train to Busan itself also screened at the New York Asian Film Festival this year, despite its age, signifying its own continued artistic reputation. People in the United States are free to watch the zombie film via Hoopla, a streaming service which grants access based on library card membership. It's strange to think, in that sense, that Train to Busan doesn't have more of a presence on a commercial service. It didn't just earn 11 million admissions in South Korea, it also broke records all across the East Asian market, and received universal praise from nearly every critic who saw it. The Wailing (2016) from Na Hong-jin also made an appearance at the New York Asian Film Festival to a similar purpose. The shaman themed horror film is available to view in the United States on more genre-focused services such as Hi-Yah.

My Name (2026)

These are very recent histories, though, and only really present in the realm of popular culture. There was a more educational element at play at the New York Asian Film Festival this year with the featuring of two full length films about the Jeju Massacre of 1948. These were Hallan (2025) from director Ha Myung-mi and My Name (2026) by Chung Ji-young. Cinema about the tragic historical event is not new. Perhaps the best known such film is Jiseul (2013), a haunting feature with a deliberately limited palette about people hiding in a cave from the military, slowly dying from hunger and freezing cold weather when a quicker, more horrible fate almost certainly awaits them up above.

Though the Jeju Massacre has long been a major topic in South Korean culture, it is not quite as well-known in English language spheres, partially because of concerns of the collaboration of the American military in fomenting its death and destruction. A brief reference is made to the Jeju Massacre in the second season of Pachinko, providing some historical perspective to events in Korea at this time not often seen in the English language. But the broader influence making the screening of Hallan and My Name a possibility at the New York Asian Film Festival this year is the permeation of trauma culture. Whether the event in question is called the Jeju Massacre or the Jeju Uprising is itself a matter of framing. A massacre implies victims while an uprising implies fighters.

The two films are complementary in this regard, since while Hallan is a survival film, horrific by nature as a mother tries to protect her child from marauding soldiers in the chaos of that historical moment, My Name is able to conceptualize a longer arc of history, tying the notorious April 3rd Incident to events like democratization in the 80s. Or, for that matter to the acknowledgment of the massacre at all in 1998, as South Korea came to have more transparency regarding its long, unsettling past since the massacre took place all those long decades ago.

Journey There (2025)

While South Korean culture has seen a boom in recent years, greater context as to how and why this country came to be is well-appreciated by audiences with a natural curiosity on such matters. It also helps to be able to see themselves in the story, as is the case with Journey There (2025), which has as one of its lead characters a Korean adoptee. Journey There is an independent drama about an old woman seeing the inevitable soonness of her death, but it also highlights the international connections South Koreans of all ages now have to the wider world, with its emphasis on Germany, piano music, and all the little historical incidents necessary to make such connections possible.

So, it is with the final film of the festival to feature the Korean language, even if it is not strictly speaking a Korean film. One Last Walk (2025) is a short film by Diana Bang and Andrea Bang, depicting a Chinese woman and a Korean woman in Canada who find friendship in each other, only to bittersweetly find that this fact just makes them seriously realize the importance of going back home. Maybe no one can ever really go home in this modern, transnational world. But at least by going to the movies of a local film festival, we can learn a little bit about these cultures we likely could not easily find any other way.

Written by William Schwartz
Edited by kofic