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Still of ‘Silent Voices’ (provided by Festival de Cannes)

Director Jin Mi-song's short film Silent Voices won Second Prize in the La Cinef section at the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 21 (local time). Competing against a field of 19 films selected from 2,750 submissions representing film schools worldwide, this 17-minute short — following a single day in the life of a Korean immigrant family — earned recognition from the jury.

Silent Voices is structurally spare but precisely calibrated. The film follows each of the four family members through their respective days, tracing how the realities each one quietly shoulders remain unshared with the others. As time passes, what holds this family together is less conversation than silence. Even as each person's day slowly unravels, no one finds it easy to bring that weight into the open in front of the others. This "silence" — which is also the film's title — functions as its primary language. The paradox in which concealing one's wounds becomes the very act of protecting the family lays bare the emotional reality of the immigrant experience.

Actor Park Ji-min, serving as a La Cinef juror, remarked at the ceremony that "the personal cannot be separated from the political," calling Silent Voices an outstanding example of precisely that. The film does not merely depict an immigrant's inner world; through the accumulation of each family member's silence, it poses the question of what it means to exist as an outsider. The jury's attention was drawn to this expansion — the way individual interiority becomes a family and social question.

La Cinef is one of Cannes' stages for affirming the potential of emerging filmmakers. In that light, Silent Voices' Second Prize is more than a single achievement for Jin as a short-form director — it reads as the starting point of a creative vision that may well expand into feature filmmaking. Having captured both individual interiority and broader social questions through the silences of an immigrant family, Jin Mi-song's next steps are sure to remain a subject of industry attention.

Sources

• Kookmin Ilbo, "Director Jin Mi-song's 'Silent Voices' wins second prize at Cannes' La Cinef," 2026.05.22

• The Korea Times, "Jin Mi-song's 'Silent Voices' wins 2nd prize in Cannes' student film section," 2026.05.22

• Munhwa Ilbo, "Director Jin Mi-song wins second prize at Cannes' La Cinef," 2026.05.22

• Seoul Shinmun, "Jin Mi-song's 'Silent Voices' takes second prize in Cannes La Cinef section," 2026.05.22

• Kookmin Ilbo, "Na Hong-jin's Hope generates overwhelming buzz despite missing the prize," 2026.05.25

• Yonhap News Agency, "Cannes student film winner Director Jin Mi-song: 'I channeled everyday defeat into cinema,'" 2026.05.22