๐ฌ Four Days to Cannes, As If Last Year Never Happened — Woody Magazine, May 8, 2026
Vol. Film
As If Last Year Never Happened
Last May, Cannes announced its official lineup without naming a single Korean feature — the first such absence in twenty-six years. Through the spring and summer that followed, Korean media questioned, at length, the long-term health of the country's film industry.
Four days from now, the 79th Festival de Cannes opens. May 12 through 23. This time, Korean cinema occupies three places on the program.
The heaviest seat goes to Park Chan-wook (63). The South Korean filmmaker — best known internationally for Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave — has been named president of the main competition jury. He is the first Korean filmmaker to hold the role in seventy-nine editions of the festival; across all of Asia, only the second, after Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai in 2006. The festival cited Park's "originality, visual command, and remarkable instinct for capturing the layered impulses of figures with strange fates."
The Korean entry in main competition is Hope, by Na Hong-jin — his first feature since The Wailing a decade ago, and his first English-language work. It marks the first Korean film in main competition since Park's own Decision to Leave in 2022.
One seat at the head of the jury. One film in competition. One in the midnight slot. Of those three, Colony reaches Korean cinemas just days after its Cannes premiere, on May 21. Whatever filled the year between zero and three will become more legible in the screenings that follow.
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