Hello, this is the Korea Queer Film Festival Executive Committee.
This year, the Korea Queer Film Festival was held under the slogan “Through Flickering Lights” To recognize the small, flickering lights drawn forth by the camera even amid difficult circumstances—the lights that endure fierce winds without ever going out—the Executive Committee selected 〈A Small Room〉 and 〈Yet to be Named〉 for KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year, and 〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 and 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 for Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films.
■ KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year
□ 〈A Small Room〉 | Director: HWANG Yujeong
- A house with another small room tucked inside it. A stranger visits the woman who lives there and naturally steps inside, as though they had already known that the room existed. Night after night, the two share drinks and spend time together, knowing almost nothing about one another.
What 〈A Small Room〉 draws forth is the lightness that comes from “not knowing someone well.” A relationship in which neither asks about the other’s past opens up a space where there is no need to explain or prove oneself. The film neither frames this encounter as a resolution to loneliness nor turns it into a grand narrative of love. Instead, it quietly observes the fleeting ease of making room for someone without fully knowing them—or perhaps precisely because one does not. Just as there is a small room within the room, the intimacy of this film blossoms in an inner space that remains unexplained, rather than in one where everything is revealed.
The lightness of a relationship in which one never has to explain oneself. It is also the quiet breath that queer intimacy discovers in a world that constantly asks about one’s identity and insists on naming it. Like a small light switched on each night, the film captures without excess how tenderness that asks for no explanation can lighten a person’s heart. For this achievement, the Executive Committee selects 〈A Small Room〉 for KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year.
□ 〈Yet to be Named〉 | Director: Mizuki Ebayashi
- Yukihiko, a twenty-eight-year-old living in Tokyo, makes films while delivering food for a living. Together with his pregnant partner, Kaede, he awaits the birth of their first child, who has yet to be named. Soon to become a father, he spends most of his days absorbed in a screenplay that does not yet have a title. The screenplay depicts an imagined conversation in which a son reunites with the father who abandoned him nearly twenty years earlier. Again and again, Yukihiko reads the scene aloud and revises it.
The film’s most beautiful quality lies in that very repetition: the desire to turn filmmaking into an act of imagining and trying to understand another person who can never be fully understood. As Yukihiko carefully considers what words to place in the mouth of the father who left him and continues revising the dialogue, he gradually comes to see him not merely as an object of resentment, but as another human being. Writing becomes not an act of escape, but a way of passing through his pain by trying to embrace, through imagination, the person who hurt him most deeply. That act of imagination soon overlaps with a question directed back at himself: “What kind of father can I become?”
The “yet to be named” state suggested by the title is therefore not a lack, but another name for possibility. An untitled screenplay, an unnamed child, and the still-undefined role of a father. Rather than rushing to fill these blanks, the film turns its camera toward the determination to build a new relationship with one’s own hands instead of passing inherited wounds on unchanged. Grounded by the instability of the times and the weight of the reality confronting its characters, the film quietly unfolds the journey of a person who embraces parenthood not as destiny, but as something that must be imagined and chosen for oneself.
In admiration of this honest and persistent attitude, in which the attempt to understand another person ultimately becomes an encounter with oneself, the Executive Committee selects 〈Yet to be Named〉 for KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year.
■ Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films
□ 〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 | Director: Yoonseul HAN
- Taewon dismisses the feelings of the previous night as a “mistake,” while Jongsam insists that he hears an unidentified sound coming from inside the wall. When the two realize that the pounding noise reverberating through the wall is Morse code, they begin deciphering its message, leading the film toward a shocking truth.
〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 is an ingenious short film that explores the inner conflict of discovering one’s queer identity and the process of self-acceptance through the mystery genre. Like identity itself—an unresolved riddle—the process of deciphering signals from beyond the wall is both secretive and sensual. In particular, the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio and almost suffocatingly tight framing brilliantly convey both the narrowing distance between the characters and the enclosed nature of their world. The implications embedded throughout its mise-en-scène sustain a dense sense of tension across its brief running time.
The fear and desire involved in breaking through the walls of a familiar world and stepping into a wider one. In recognition of this remarkable nine-minute achievement, which beautifully captures, through its imaginative use of genre, “a small, flickering light piercing thinly through the darkness”—an image that embodies the meaning of this year’s festival slogan—the Executive Committee selects 〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 for Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films.
□ 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 | Director: Ollie Launspach
- Director Ollie Launspach weaves together home videos, photographs, diary entries, voice recordings, and interviews into a cinematic love portrait. What he initially sought to observe was the mark his gender transition had left on the heart of his partner, Sterre Mulder. Yet the more deeply he tried to understand her emotional world, the more clearly the turmoil within himself emerged from behind the lens.
The greatest strength of 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 lies in its refusal to confine love to a single perspective or a seamless narrative. Its collage of fragmented media embraces, without judgment, the tremors and fractures experienced by a relationship as it moves through the changes of transition. With a touch that is both light and incisive, the film traces the disorienting and intimate dynamics of a relationship, ultimately turning the camera that had been directed toward another person back toward the filmmaker himself. This honest shift in perspective reveals that loving another person and becoming oneself can never truly be separated.
Because the film faces that unsteady, anxiously flickering inner light without looking away, the Executive Committee selects 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 for Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films.
We hope that these films, each of which has shimmered in its own place with its own distinctive color, will come together amid the flickering lights to form one great constellation.
Thank you.
✨ Help us build the Korea Queer Film Festival together so that the flickering lights can illuminate more stories.
- Donate in Korea: https://donate.do/SQCF2026 (Credit card payments available)
- Donate from overseas via PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/sqcforg
Hello, this is the Korea Queer Film Festival Executive Committee.
This year, the Korea Queer Film Festival was held under the slogan “Through Flickering Lights” To recognize the small, flickering lights drawn forth by the camera even amid difficult circumstances—the lights that endure fierce winds without ever going out—the Executive Committee selected 〈A Small Room〉 and 〈Yet to be Named〉 for KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year, and 〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 and 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 for Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films.
■ KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year
□ 〈A Small Room〉 | Director: HWANG Yujeong
- A house with another small room tucked inside it. A stranger visits the woman who lives there and naturally steps inside, as though they had already known that the room existed. Night after night, the two share drinks and spend time together, knowing almost nothing about one another.
What 〈A Small Room〉 draws forth is the lightness that comes from “not knowing someone well.” A relationship in which neither asks about the other’s past opens up a space where there is no need to explain or prove oneself. The film neither frames this encounter as a resolution to loneliness nor turns it into a grand narrative of love. Instead, it quietly observes the fleeting ease of making room for someone without fully knowing them—or perhaps precisely because one does not. Just as there is a small room within the room, the intimacy of this film blossoms in an inner space that remains unexplained, rather than in one where everything is revealed.
The lightness of a relationship in which one never has to explain oneself. It is also the quiet breath that queer intimacy discovers in a world that constantly asks about one’s identity and insists on naming it. Like a small light switched on each night, the film captures without excess how tenderness that asks for no explanation can lighten a person’s heart. For this achievement, the Executive Committee selects 〈A Small Room〉 for KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year.
□ 〈Yet to be Named〉 | Director: Mizuki Ebayashi
- Yukihiko, a twenty-eight-year-old living in Tokyo, makes films while delivering food for a living. Together with his pregnant partner, Kaede, he awaits the birth of their first child, who has yet to be named. Soon to become a father, he spends most of his days absorbed in a screenplay that does not yet have a title. The screenplay depicts an imagined conversation in which a son reunites with the father who abandoned him nearly twenty years earlier. Again and again, Yukihiko reads the scene aloud and revises it.
The film’s most beautiful quality lies in that very repetition: the desire to turn filmmaking into an act of imagining and trying to understand another person who can never be fully understood. As Yukihiko carefully considers what words to place in the mouth of the father who left him and continues revising the dialogue, he gradually comes to see him not merely as an object of resentment, but as another human being. Writing becomes not an act of escape, but a way of passing through his pain by trying to embrace, through imagination, the person who hurt him most deeply. That act of imagination soon overlaps with a question directed back at himself: “What kind of father can I become?”
The “yet to be named” state suggested by the title is therefore not a lack, but another name for possibility. An untitled screenplay, an unnamed child, and the still-undefined role of a father. Rather than rushing to fill these blanks, the film turns its camera toward the determination to build a new relationship with one’s own hands instead of passing inherited wounds on unchanged. Grounded by the instability of the times and the weight of the reality confronting its characters, the film quietly unfolds the journey of a person who embraces parenthood not as destiny, but as something that must be imagined and chosen for oneself.
In admiration of this honest and persistent attitude, in which the attempt to understand another person ultimately becomes an encounter with oneself, the Executive Committee selects 〈Yet to be Named〉 for KQFF Choice: Our Queer Films of the Year.
■ Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films
□ 〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 | Director: Yoonseul HAN
- Taewon dismisses the feelings of the previous night as a “mistake,” while Jongsam insists that he hears an unidentified sound coming from inside the wall. When the two realize that the pounding noise reverberating through the wall is Morse code, they begin deciphering its message, leading the film toward a shocking truth.
〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 is an ingenious short film that explores the inner conflict of discovering one’s queer identity and the process of self-acceptance through the mystery genre. Like identity itself—an unresolved riddle—the process of deciphering signals from beyond the wall is both secretive and sensual. In particular, the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio and almost suffocatingly tight framing brilliantly convey both the narrowing distance between the characters and the enclosed nature of their world. The implications embedded throughout its mise-en-scène sustain a dense sense of tension across its brief running time.
The fear and desire involved in breaking through the walls of a familiar world and stepping into a wider one. In recognition of this remarkable nine-minute achievement, which beautifully captures, through its imaginative use of genre, “a small, flickering light piercing thinly through the darkness”—an image that embodies the meaning of this year’s festival slogan—the Executive Committee selects 〈Skeletons in the Wall〉 for Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films.
□ 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 | Director: Ollie Launspach
- Director Ollie Launspach weaves together home videos, photographs, diary entries, voice recordings, and interviews into a cinematic love portrait. What he initially sought to observe was the mark his gender transition had left on the heart of his partner, Sterre Mulder. Yet the more deeply he tried to understand her emotional world, the more clearly the turmoil within himself emerged from behind the lens.
The greatest strength of 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 lies in its refusal to confine love to a single perspective or a seamless narrative. Its collage of fragmented media embraces, without judgment, the tremors and fractures experienced by a relationship as it moves through the changes of transition. With a touch that is both light and incisive, the film traces the disorienting and intimate dynamics of a relationship, ultimately turning the camera that had been directed toward another person back toward the filmmaker himself. This honest shift in perspective reveals that loving another person and becoming oneself can never truly be separated.
Because the film faces that unsteady, anxiously flickering inner light without looking away, the Executive Committee selects 〈kiss kiss bang bang〉 for Honorable Mention by the Executive Committee: Our Noteworthy Queer Films.
We hope that these films, each of which has shimmered in its own place with its own distinctive color, will come together amid the flickering lights to form one great constellation.
Thank you.
✨ Help us build the Korea Queer Film Festival together so that the flickering lights can illuminate more stories.
- Donate in Korea: https://donate.do/SQCF2026 (Credit card payments available)
- Donate from overseas via PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/sqcforg