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Festival 2023
Stateless Things
South Korea, 2011

FeatureFocus Korea
Directed by
Kim Kyung-Mook
Running time
120 mins
FeatureFocus Korea

The second instalment in Kim Kyung-Mook’s acclaimed ‘Things’ trilogy, this arthouse drama follows two young men in parallel stories. Joon, a young North Korean man who has illegally emigrated to South Korea, works in a gas station. When his colleague Soon-hee, a Chinese immigrant of Korean ethnicity, is subjected to sexual harassment, Joon steps in to protect her. Hyun is a young gay man, financially reliant on his older lover, in whose luxury apartment he lives. He feels suffocated by his claustrophobic existence. Although their stories are very different, Joon and Hyun are connected by their loneliness and desperation. A poetic work that draws thematic parallels between the life experiences of homosexuals and illegal immigrants, Stateless Things evolves into a searing indictment of social exclusion and cultural hypocrisy. 


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Director Bio



Kim KyungMook is a filmmaker based in Seoul. Acclaimed for their trilogy which consists of Faceless Things (2005), Stateless Things (2011), and Futureless Things (2014), Kim’s films have screened and received awards at numerous international film festivals, including Venice, Rotterdam, and London. In 2015, they were sentenced to eighteen months in prison after objecting to South Korea’s mandatory military service. They are currently majoring in Visual Arts (DFA) at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communication & Arts.  

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