Heo Ga-young didn't expect to get on course —then she won at Cannes

Korea Herald

18 hours ago

From a no-budget short film to La Cinef's top prize, the director reflects on her creative journey and the uncertain road ahead
When Heo Ga-young applied to the Korean Academy of Film Arts with a bare-bones seven-minute film about sweet and sour pork, she figured she'd blown it.
The school was Korea's most prestigious film program, the kind of place where industry veterans compete for spots alongside wannabe auteurs hoping to follow alumni like Bong Joon-ho.
Her portfolio consisted of two amateur actors arguing over the ubiquitous Korean-Chinese dish — specifically, whether to pour the sauce on top or dip each piece. Total budget: basically nothing. Film background: some homemade clips and scripts, but nothing that really counted.
"Some interviewers asked if I was mocking the school. Another said I had serious nerve," she says over coffee in Seoul. It was, she later learned, the shortest and cheapest submission in KAFA history.
Then Jung Sung-il spoke up. Korea's most respected film critic and instructor at KAFA — the one cinephiles quote chapter and verse — saw something different.
"He told me he didn't have questions, just advice. He said I was a genius, that I needed to make films, that most people wouldn't love my work but the ones who did would be obsessed with it forever." She laughs at the memory. "I had no clue who he was. Just this old guy being weirdly nice."
Two years later, Heo's graduation film "First Summer" won the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival's La Cinef competition, a competitive showcase for film school students, making her the first Korean filmmaker to take the top honor. It was also the only Korean film at Cannes this year — a lonely victory for a Korean film industry that is increasingly anxious about its global standing.
The path from that strange interview to Cannes began, as these things often do, with family.
While an undergraduate student at Yonsei University, Heo was assigned to interview an elderly person for a class project. She chose her grandmother, a woman she'd lived with as a teenager but never really understood.
"I thought she didn't love me," Heo says. "Korean grandmothers are supposed to be warm, cooking for their grandchildren. Mine was cold, kind of twisted. She never made me a single meal. Did face masks every night but wouldn't share even one with her granddaughter."
The conversation changed everything.
"First thing out of her mouth: 'I have a boyfriend but can't reach him, so I'm taking sleeping pills because I'm so worried.' In that moment, I saw her for the first time — not as my grandmother or my mother's mother, but as a woman. My whole concept of elderly people just flipped upside down."
That revelation sent Heo prowling Busan's streets, notebook in hand. She struck up random conversations with elderly people on street corners, visited the city's "colatecques" -- dance clubs where seniors socialize over Coke instead of alcohol.
The first few times, she got turned away for being too young.
"Once they heard I was making a film about elderly people, everything changed," she said. "They told me personal stories, became extras in the film, lent me their clothes."
The colatecques revealed their own logic, their own culture. Open during daylight hours, closing by six so grandmothers could get home to cook dinner. Coffee from vending machines, trot music on the speakers, and that particular intimacy of partner dancing.
"An old man asked me to dance, and suddenly his face was right there in front of mine. That's when I understood what having a dance partner means at that age. It's not about romance. It's about feeling alive, being a social creature, that physical struggle against disappearing."
Her first draft told the story from a granddaughter's perspective — a young woman trying to understand her eccentric grandmother.
Everyone loved it: The actors loved it, the school loved it. Heo had doubts.
"I realized I was objectifying her all over again, romanticizing old age through my twentysomething lens. The story began with my grandmother's actual life. The moment I made it fake, the film would fail."
A month before production, she rewrote everything from the grandmother's perspective.
"The staff lost their minds," she says.
The final version follows Yeong-sun, played with fierce dignity by veteran actor Heo Jin, as she chooses between attending her granddaughter's wedding and her younger boyfriend's funeral (spoiler alert: She picks the funeral). What unfolds is a portrait of grief, desire and late-life self-discovery that refuses to look away from its subject's complexity.
At Cannes, the jury — including German filmmaker Maren Ade, whose "Toni Erdmann" Heo had studied obsessively in school — raved about the film.
"They kept saying they loved it, love with a capital L," Heo recalls.
But the real validation came from audiences at the post-ceremony screening in Paris.
"Elderly women thanked me for making them protagonists. People said they needed to call their grandmothers immediately. One person said, 'Thank you for telling a story that isn't fake.' As a filmmaker, you can't ask for more than that."
The warmth of that reception couldn't mask the reality Heo returned to in Korea. The film industry she'd entered two years ago is struggling to find its post-pandemic footing.
Box office numbers remain sluggish, screen monopolies by a few blockbusters has worsened, and government funding for the arts has been slashed. Young directors are entering an industry that claimed to want fresh voices while demanding increasingly formulaic products.
"They tell us in school to develop our unique vision, our own cinematic language," Heo says. "Then you graduate and realize the market only wants copies of what worked last year. You watch your seniors compromise until their films could be directed by anyone."
Which made Monday's meeting at the Presidential Office all the more surreal. President Lee Jae-myung had gathered Korea's recent international award winners — including Tony Award-winning musical writer Park Chun-hue, Prix de Lausanne ballet champion Park Youn-jae and world-renowned soprano Jo Sumi.
Heo sat among them as Korean cinema's sole representative, there because her student film had salvaged some pride for an industry shut out of every major film festival this year.
The president's first words to her landed with perfect irony: "I hope you'll succeed as a commercial filmmaker."
Heo wanted to ask what he meant by commercial. Instead, with cameras rolling and officials watching, she talked about the crisis eating Korean cinema alive. How film schools train directors to develop unique voices, how the industry claims to want innovation, but how market realities force young filmmakers into predetermined molds.
"We lose our cinematic language trying to fit into boxes labeled 'profitable,'" she said.
She made her pitch: Adopt the French model where blockbuster profits fund diverse filmmaking through taxation and redistribution.
"Audiences are smarter than we think. They recognize good stories. But those stories have to exist first. When you maintain a steady supply of diverse films, the culture survives. In France, people still see movies as art, still go on dates to the cinema, because that ecosystem exists."
The cameras rolled, ministers nodded politely, and Heo stumbled through her prepared remarks, forgetting half of what she had planned to say.
"I was so nervous," she says. "All those cameras, all that pressure to represent an entire industry in crisis. I always thought I thrived onstage — guess not."
That pressure reflects something deeper about the way Heo approaches her work. Throughout the interview, she returns repeatedly to broader questions of purpose and ethics. It would be reductive to label this activism — filmmakers create, and it would be blasphemous to suggest otherwise.
But it's hard to miss how deeply Heo's awareness of cinema's social dimensions shapes her work. When sustainable filmmaking in financial terms is mentioned, she immediately pivots to environmental concerns — the mountains of waste generated after each shoot. When discussing "First Summer," she frames it in terms of violence of representation and the filmmaker's accountability.
"Film is inherently violent," she says. "You're in a dark room, experiencing a director's world one-sidedly for hours. People pay money, give their time. We owe them something meaningful in return. Having a platform means having power. I feel that weight constantly."
That weight drives the two scripts she's currently developing — one about a middle-aged female bassist, another about a couple trafficking abortion pills. But drive alone doesn't secure anything. Despite the Cannes victory and fawning media coverage, despite the presidential photo op and industry acclaim, Heo knows her future remains as precarious as any young filmmaker's.
"We all live with this low-grade panic," she says. "Winning at Cannes was an incredible honor, but it guarantees nothing about my next film getting made. I constantly hear about projects being cancelled. I see directors becoming replaceable parts in an assembly line. The fear is that I've finally found my voice, and I'll have to lose it just to survive."
"First Summer" will get a limited theatrical release in Korea next month, part of ongoing negotiations between KAFA and distributors. Theater chain representatives declined to comment on the matter. It's an important progress and victory for a student film that might otherwise struggle to find an audience, but hardly a career guarantee for Heo.
Asked if she is optimistic about cinema's future, particularly in an era of shrinking attention spans and binge-watching, Heo doesn't hesitate.
"Honestly? I'm pretty pessimistic." She pauses, reconsidering. "But I think every artist secretly harbors hope. Why else would we do this? We believe our work might shift something in the world, even if slightly. Film is becoming niche culture — maybe that's inevitable. But we still have to try."
She finishes her coffee and shrugs.