Korean Film Festival in Australia

Overview

Korean television made history in 2025, when season three of Squid Game broke Netflix viewership and ranking records. Parasite, Korea's big Oscar-winner, is in the spotlight at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival courtesy of new big-screen sessions with composer Jung Jae-il conducting and performing its score live. That movie's director Bong Joon-ho released his first feature, Mickey 17, since his most-acclaimed picture. They're just some of the ways that 2025 has already been excellent if you love Korean film and television.

Here's another: from Thursday, August 21–Tuesday, August 26, the Korean Film Festival in Australia is returning for its latest run. Back in 2010 when it debuted, it did so in Sydney. The Harbour City remains the event's main home in 2025, too, at Event Cinema George Street.

Hear Me: Our Summer is on opening duties. The romantic drama co-stars former Iz*One member Kim Minju, remakes Taiwan's Hear Me and sees a love story blossom via Korean Sign Language. Sydney audiences can also catch the South Korean spin on 2011 Colombian film Hidden Face, with Parasite's Cho Yeo-jeong among the cast; see a new take on Mary Shelley's masterpiece via Frankenstein Father; watch more K-pop stars, including An So-hee leading the Seoul-set The Daechi Scandal and EXO's Doh Kyung-soo feature in Secret: Untold Melody; and get a dose of crime thrills via Dirty Money. A 4K restoration of 1999's spy thriller Shiri is showing in the Harbour City as well.

If you're keen to hear more about a number of titles on the lineup, Hear Me: Our Summer director Jo Seon-ho, Hidden Face helmer Kim Dae-woo and About Family's Yang Woo-seok are all attending the fest — and so is The Noisy Mansion's Lee Lu-da, plus actor Gyeong Su-jin. And if you're wondering about the last of those two movies, About Family is a dramedy about a chef discovering that he might have grandchildren, while The Noisy Mansion focuses on a tenant and her neighbours trying to discover why their building is plagued by strange sounds — and Forbidden Fairytale is about a children's book author who starts ghostwriting online erotica.