This year, JEONJU IFF’s Midnight Cinema is expected to be more unique than any other year. The directors of the six films introduced in this section are of various nationalities, including Norway, Spain, South Africa, Finland, China, and the United Kingdom. In addition, four of those six are genre films that were delicately woven by female filmmakers.

The British film She Will, directed by filmmaker and multimedia artist Charlotte Colbert, is a bitter revenge drama that reveals the blood-soaked history of women. The main character Veronica is an actor who rose to stardom at a young age when she starred in a film directed by a famous director but suffers from the traumatic event she experienced at the time. After her mastectomy, she travels to the Scottish countryside to recuperate. She discovers that the place she is staying is the site where women were burned as witches in the past, and she begins to experience strange events. Spain´s Carlota Pereda´s PIGGY is another film about terrifying revenge. The story follows Sarah, who is bullied by local girls for being overweight. When she witnesses a man kidnapping those girls in town, Sarah feels a kind of solidarity with him and keeps silent about his existence as a means of taking vengeance on the girls who have tormented her. This is a feature film based on a short film of the same title screened at the JEONJU IFF in 2019.

Directed by Jenna Cato Bass, Good Madam depicts the psychological horror of a woman in South Africa, where racism and slavery still remain deeply rooted in society. The main character, Tsidi, moves to a wealthy village near Cape Town to live with her mother. She doesn’t understand how her mother served her white "Madam" for many years, and she begins to experience sinister and fearful fantasies. Finnish director Hanna Bergholm´s Hatching begins with a unique imagination. Tinja, a 12-year-old gymnast, desperately tries to please her demanding mother, who always wants her to be the best. Shortly after her mother kills a bird that entered their house, Tinja discovers an egg and brings it home. When the egg grows to a surprising size and a shocking creature hatches, Tinja´s life is completely changed. The film portrays the psychology of a repressed girl in unpredictable narrative development.

Eskil Vogt´s The Innocents is also an amazingly imaginative film. Set in a residential complex on the outskirts of Norway, the film features a group of children bullied or who suffer from autism as its main characters. Then, it is revealed that these children have supernatural powers, such as telepathy, telekinesis, and mind control. Becoming aware of their abilities, the children begin to develop these powers. As these superpowers begin to spiral out of control, the children stand up to face their powers. It shows the world of children who break free from their innocence using the story archetypes of genre films. A thriller that takes place in a confined space, One and Four is a debut film by Jigme Trinley, a young Chinese director from Tibet. The film, which seems to have been deeply inspired by Kurosawa Akira´s Rashomon (1950), is set in a remote mountain cabin. Through the stories of a forest ranger and the strangers who visit the cabin, this film questions the reality of ambiguous truth. Pema Tseden, the producer of this film and one of Tibet´s leading film directors today, is Trinley’s father.

Written by Programmer MOON Seok