THE STONE Screens Out of Competition


 
LEE Su-jin’s highly-regarded debut feature Han Gong-ju has been invited to compete in the main competition of this year’s Marrakesh International Film Festival. Also screening at the festival will be CHO Se-rae’s The Stone.

 

Han Gong-ju, which will be having its international premiere, won the CGV Movie Collage Award and shared the Citizen’s Reviewer’s Award with LEE Yu-bin’s Shuttlecock at last month’s 18th Busan International Film Festival. Meanwhile, The Stone, which also screened at this year’s Busan, had its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival back in August. It will have its African premiere out of competition in Marrakech.

 

LEE’s film follows a girl named HAN Gong-ju who is forced to move schools following a terrible incident. Living with a stranger and cold to her new classmates, it takes a long time for her past to come back to the fore, but when it does the revelation is devastating. In The Stone, a young baduk player befriends a gangster who is tiring of his criminal life. He encourages the young prodigy to become a professional and not follow him down the same path.
 
Marrakech is no stranger to Korean cinema, having held a significant 44-film Korean focus back in 2009. In recent years, PARK Jung-bum’s The Journals of Musan earned the festival’s top prize, the Golden Star, in 2010 while last year LEE Don-ku’s Fatal, another dark social realist work with much in common with Han Gong-ju, was also invited to the fest’s main competition.

 

This year’s 13th Marrakech International Film Festival will unspool from November 29th to December 7th.