At Korea’s queer film festivals, Pride finds a home on and off screen

At the Seoul Queer Culture Festival (SQCF) on Saturday, one booth held its usual place near the entrance to the closed-off street, where crowds moved through the summer heat waving rainbow flags and colorful signs.

The stall belonged to the Korea Queer Film Festival, or KQFF, part of Korea’s largest annual LGBTQ+ celebration. The festival, which runs from June 26 to 28, has been part of the SQCF since its launch in 2001, though it is often overshadowed by the better-known Seoul Queer Parade.

Queer cinema broke ground in Korea in the 1970s, before the country had a visible, organized movement, as sociologist Kim Pil-ho and C. Colin Singer write in the academic paper “Three Periods of Korean Queer Cinema: Invisible, Camouflage, and Blockbuster” (2011).

Since Park Jae-ho’s “Broken Branches” (1995), widely regarded as Korea’s first feature-length film centered on a gay protagonist, queer themes have moved into the mainstream, from the blockbuster success of “The King and the Clown” (2005) to internationally acclaimed works such as Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” (2016), the first Korean movie to win a British Academy of Film and Television Arts, or BAFTA, award.

Programs such as the KQFF, the country’s longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival, brought queer cinema into the spotlight, offered representation and cultivated spaces where queer people could find one another. Even now, as these films grow in number and become more accessible thanks to streaming platforms, festivals remain an important part of how movies reach audiences — and people continue to seek them out.

A space to be seen

For Shin Hyo-jin, the director of KQFF, it’s about what festivals can find and frame. Streaming platforms tend to favor works with a proven market, such as movies with English titles or by established directors, he said, but festivals can introduce films that algorithms are unlikely to recommend: works without distributors, outside commercial distribution or by unknown directors.

“OTT [over-the-top] algorithms recommend things that are similar to what people have already watched,” Shin wrote in an email. “Festivals bring what audiences have not yet encountered.”

Festivals play a crucial role in providing production support and exposure, especially as the industry slump leaves independent filmmakers — who produce much of Korea’s queer cinematography and some of its more varied representations of LGBTQ+ lives — with fewer opportunities to secure investment and shorter box office windows.

Lee Yu-jin, the director of “Manok” (2025), a comedy about a middle-aged lesbian, said that she was unable to attract private investment and spent nearly a year pitching the movie to public agencies and for production grants.

“When the industry is struggling, investment naturally favors the more [politically and socially] conservative,” Lee said. “Films with queer protagonists or queer subjects are not especially welcome in that environment.”

The Seoul International Pride Film Festival (SIPFF), the largest queer film festival in Korea, offers funding and direct production support through its Pride Film Project, which birthed “Cicada” (2020),  a short film that placed second in the Cinéfondation section at Cannes in 2021. The KQFF, through its KQFF Choice awards, recommends selected films to other domestic and international film festivals. 

Festivals can also adapt to their audience and address their needs.

SIPFF holds Summer Pride Cinema in June before its main festival in October. What began as a one-off event in 2017 became annual after unexpectedly attracting a large number of queer women, some of whom told organizers that there were few summer events in which they could openly participate as their true selves, said Kim Seung-hwan, a programmer at SIPFF. That response led SIPFF to place greater emphasis on sapphic stories at Summer Pride Cinema while showing more broadly accessible films for the autumn festival, which draws a more diverse audience, including non-LGBTQ+ viewers.

“Many heterosexual men first come [to the October event] with their girlfriends, then later return with their own friends,” he said. “They tell us that they felt more willing [to attend] after being here once and simply think that the films are good.”

A space to feel safe 

People at the parade told the Korea JoongAng Daily that watching queer films on their own had helped them understand their gender identity or sexual orientation. But seeing a film alongside other LGBTQ+ viewers can add another dimension, according to Kim: A scene that makes one person uncomfortable could make someone beside them laugh, allowing both to reconsider their initial response.

There is, of course, also the sense of solidarity that forms in the given space.

“People buy tickets, sit in the same place and look at the same screen,” Shin said. “When they laugh, they laugh together; when the room falls silent, they fall silent together.

“They discover that they are not alone, and that experience does not become just one person’s memory. It becomes part of the community’s collective memory.”

That is why physical spaces remain central to queer cinema, despite the convenience of watching movies online. But these spaces are often difficult to secure.

The clearest metaphor for that struggle could be found at SQCF on Saturday. Near Euljiro Station, close to the festival site, stood a banner of Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon. People had covered his face with rainbow hearts and stickers reading, “They say there are more good adults now. I want to become one, too.”

Oh, who was recently elected for his fifth term as the mayor of Seoul, has publicly said that he “cannot support homosexuality,” and that holding the SQCF at Seoul Plaza is “not desirable.” After securing the city’s main square as its venue for six years in a row, the Pride gathering has been denied permission to return for the past four years.

Film festivals, too, have had to fight to take up space. Last year, KQFF organizers were told that Art House Momo, a theater at Ewha Womans University, could not host the festival again after doing so in 2024, explaining that “screenings that conflict with its Christian founding principles can not be allowed on campus.”

In protest and solidarity, students held the first Ewha Queer Film Festival under the slogan “Beyond rejection” last July.

“Queer existence goes beyond rejection,” the students said at a news conference. “With this festival, we declare our intention to overcome the power to grant or withhold permission for an individual’s existence.”

University students at Pride described similar problems when organizing their own screenings. A student from Soongsil University, another school founded on Christian principles, said that the university “doesn’t even allow [their LGBTQ+] club to register as an official student organization, let alone hold a [queer] film festival.” In 2015, the university blocked the queer club’s inaugural “Human Rights Film Festival” after students planned to screen a film about same-sex marriage.

Even at places that allow screenings, concerns about privacy and safety can limit who attends. A student from People2People, Korea University’s LGBTQ+ club, said that the group holds one screening each semester and decides every time whether to open the event to nonmembers. But the club usually decides to restrict access over fears that attendees could be outed.

“We sometimes feel compelled to make ourselves smaller,” the student said.

Still, there have been signs of progress. Last November, several groups at Chung-Ang University, including Rainbow Fish, the university’s LGBTQ+ community, jointly organized the school’s first Edge Film Festival. Queer films, including “God’s Daughter Dances” (2020) and “Chaehwa” (2024), were screened at the event, which was open to the rest of the student body.

“A lot of Rainbow Fish members study film, so they were actively involved, and the festival was very queer-friendly,” a student from the group said.

For KQFF, that struggle over space is part of a longer history — one in which queer culture has had to keep finding new places to grow and thrive while preserving memories of the past.

“I think of KQFF as a living archive,” Shin said. “For 26 years, it has recorded the lives of queer Koreans […] and the changes [within the community], and that record has become the foundation of creation and solidarity for the next generation.”

Ryu, a former deputy director of KQFF who came to volunteer at the festival’s booth, saw the same history in Pride’s move from Seoul Plaza to Euljiro.

“Film reflects reality,” she said. “Pride has moved from the plaza into the streets. Queer cinema has followed — and will follow — the same trajectory.”

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]