EXCLUSIVE: Coproduction Office has acquired international sales rights to Korean director Syeyoung Park’s The Fin, that is set to premiere at Locarno Film Festival in the Cinema of the Present section.
The second feature is set in a post-war, ecologically devastated Korea where mutated outcasts called Omegas are captured and exploited as cheap labour. The film follows a newly recruited government worker who becomes suspicious of an Omega in hiding working in a dark, eerie fishing store and begins to question her once unshakable faith in the state’s ideology.
The Fin is produced by Heejung Oh for Korea’s Seesaw Pictures, Coproduction Office founder Philippe Bober for his German production outfit Essential Filmproduktion, and director Park for Pretty Things Films, with the support of Doha Film Institute.
Bober described the filmmaker as “a confident and distinctive new voice in contemporary cinema”.
He added: “With The Fin, Syeyoung demonstrates a rare visual talent, despite the film’s low budget. He masterfully uses genre as a lens to explore social fractures, addressing themes of totalitarianism, disinformation, and exclusion in a timely manner, and with remarkable poetry.”
Park’s first feature The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra competed at Sitges Film Festival, Berlin Critics’ Week, Torino Film Festival and won a slew of prizes at film festivals across the globe.
Producer Oh described Park as “one of the most audacious voices of a new generation…[the film is] …a bold fusion of genre and social commentary, capturing the tensions faced by today’s youth in a time of ecological and ideological upheaval”.
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