Open Shutters

The Non-Biological Mexican

In the heart of Seoul, South Korea, a man named Jung-Su Lee has dedicated his life to mastering the art of Mexican cuisine. This film explores this journey, how an unexpected connection reshaped his identity.

Permission to Exist

2020

In just sixty years, South Korea went from being one of the poorest countries on the Asian continent to having the 12th largest economy in the entire world. Every year, it is measured that Korean students have some of the highest test scores and a higher rate of acceptance into Ivy League schools compared to all other nations. But on the flip side, South Korea also has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, the highest gender pay gap of all developed countries, and the highest plastic surgery rate per capita. Always expected to receive top scores and constantly bombarded by media and messages that seem to demand nothing short of visual “perfection,” how do these individuals come to accept and learn to love themselves as they are?

Hacked: The Bangladesh Bank Heist

2018 · ★ 6

This film investigates one of the world’s biggest and most audacious cyberheists, where hackers managed to compromise two of the most respected names in international banking, the SWIFT messaging system and the New York Federal Reserve, taking $81 million in the process. Follow the trail of the stolen money from Dhaka, to Manila and New York, and discover who the hackers were and how they did it.

Gone Girl

2025 · ★ 10

Kayleigh Haywood, a teenage girl addicted to social media, meets a stranger online who lures her into a trap.

K-Hip-Hop, l'onde de choc sud-coréenne

2022 · ★ 7

No synopsis available.

Shadow Flowers

2021

Ryun-hee Kim, a North Korean housewife, was forced to come to South Korea and became its citizen against her will. As her seven years of struggle to go back to her family in North Korea continues, the political absurdity hinders her journey back to her loved ones. The life of her family in the North goes on in emptiness, and she fears that she might become someone, like a shadow, who exists only in the fading memory of her family.​

White Jungle

2011 · ★ 6

It is year 2011 and the government still talks of economic growth through medical care under the table. In reality, common people cannot afford to go to a hospital. They are nothing but extra casts in a promotional film for showing. The reality is a white jungle where medical care has become the market of extreme commercialization and doctors and patients are just too familiar with the physiology of jungle life. New rules and regulations must be practiced in this jungle. The film finds a solution by looking at medical care not as a personal means of production but community welfare.

Becoming Kim

2026

German filmmaker Susanne, married to a Korean man named Kim Jeong Rae, turns the camera toward her own intercultural marriage and family with both humor and tenderness. Blending vérité and performance, the film dives into the beautiful mess of love, identity, and cultural collision. Becoming Kim asks: How do we stay true to ourselves—while learning to love another?

Mis-President

2017 · ★ 4.5

My father led a coup in 1961. Two years later, I became the president's daughter.

K-Classics Generation

2020 · ★ 8

The film traces the career of some of the winners of this new generation nicknamed the "K-Classics Generation", including the 2 recent winners of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, the soprano Hwang Sumi and the violinist Lim Jiyoung. In Korea, where it all began, and in Germany where most of them have settled.

Goshawk - Soul of the Wind

2015

A visually stunning portrait of one of nature's most agile and fearsome predators, the Goshawk. This secretive bird of prey can be hard to see in the UK, but reigns supreme in Korea's mountains.

Shim: American Opens a Cafe at the DMZ

2024 · ★ 10

A cafe is growing, tucked in to the mountainside air raid shelter of the DMZ borderlands. A light light flickers, illuminating the past, present, and future. I'll see you at the DMZ! Shim was a free, one-day pop-up cafe staged in Yangji-ri village’s air raid shelter at the Korean DMZ. Referencing Korean cafe culture’s fixation on third place, the DMZ’s evolution from security tourism, to ecological peace tourism, and its repurposing as art production site, Shim attempts to intervene and align the past and present. Yangji-ri was one of many minbuk propaganda villages established by the Park Chung Hee regime in the 1960s to showcase the farming bounty and prosperity of the south for a North Korean gaze. The village was formerly part of the Civilian Control Line (CCL) until 2013 when it was reterritorialized as a normal part of South Korea.