[Bucheon Choice World: Shorts]
Best Film | Levantamuertos: Cumbia for the dead (Director: José Eduardo CASTILLA PONCE)
Jury’s Choice | Switch Off (Director: Sandeep FRANCIS)
Audience Award | The Last Jiangshi (Director: YU Chih-Chieh)

[Bucheon Choice Korean: Shorts]
Best Film | Mungchi (Director: HONG Seung-gi)
KFAA Best Actor | Han Yoo-yeon (Turning girl)
Audience Award | Siren (Director: LEE Soo-hyuk)


¡á Commentary

[Bucheon Choice World: Shorts]
This year’s selected works went beyond mere mastery of genre, demonstrating how horror and fantasy can serve as powerful tools for exploring the depths of human experience and society. By subverting familiar conventions, these films engage with themes of love and desire, oppression, identity, violence, and a deep passion for cinema itself—each in its own distinct way—while opening up new possibilities for genre filmmaking. In particular, the award-winning works were distinguished by their strong individuality and exceptional directorial vision, each establishing a distinctive cinematic language of its own. They were highly acclaimed for achieving both the visceral pleasures of genre cinema and a profound artistic depth. We believe these films not only reflect the current landscape of genre cinema, but also represent a significant achievement that points to an even more compelling future for the genre.

¢º Best Film | Levantamuertos: Cumbia for the dead (Director: José Eduardo CASTILLA PONCE)
Its wildly imaginative premise may seem almost unbelievable at first, and its low-budget production and deliberately unpolished filmmaking style are not weaknesses but rather among the film's greatest strengths. Neither the living nor the dead are portrayed as purely virtuous; instead, every character radiates a deeply human charm. Blending moments of brutal violence with a distinctive sense of humor and the quiet melancholy of those who died with unfinished business, the film creates a poignant emotional texture that enriches this colorful buddy road movie with a corpse.

¢º Jury’s Choice | Switch Off (Director: Sandeep FRANCIS)
The moment the phone springs to life, Switch Off grabs the audience by the collar and never lets go. Demonstrating a precise command of genre conventions, the film never misses its mark, using razor-sharp editing and clever narrative construction to maximize its dramatic impact within a short runtime. In a genre all too easily dismissed as formulaic, it pushes forward with unwavering conviction and striking force—an assurance that makes the jury more than happy to flip the switch.

¢º Audience Award | The Last Jiangshi (Director: YU Chih-Chieh)


[Bucheon Choice Korean: Shorts]
This year’s Bucheon Choice Korean: Shorts showcased outstanding works that, grounded in genre imagination, delicately captured the ordinary emotions and inner lives of everyday people. Reimagining familiar subjects through fresh perspectives, these films combined distinctive direction, tightly crafted storytelling, and deeply authentic performances to strike a profound emotional chord. In these works, which deftly balance genre experimentation with emotional authenticity, the jury found clear evidence of both the vitality of Korean short cinema today and its promising future.

¢º Best Film | Mungchi (Director: HONG Seung-gi)
People are all too quick to imagine who others are—and to judge them. Mungchi serves as a quiet warning against such easy assumptions. The direction is particularly striking in how it seamlessly brings together two seemingly opposing textures—nostalgia-tinged cuteness and an undercurrent of the grotesque—within a single character. In the end, Mungchi’s final gesture and sound speak more powerfully than words ever could, striking straight at the heart.

¢º KFAA Best Actor | Han Yoo-yeon (Turning girl)
In Turning Girl, Han Yoo-yeon delivers a deeply affecting performance as Yeoreum, capturing a character collapsing under repeated failures and a deep sense of inferiority through a single, simple action: a cartwheel. It is a performance driven less by technical polish than by raw sincerity, and it is precisely this unfiltered energy that carries the film.

¢º Audience Award | Siren (Director: LEE Soo-hyuk)