Japanese and South Korean youth cinema, seen through uncertainty, pressure and unfinished growth.
Youth, uncertainty and unfinished arrival
Youth is often told as a story with an endpoint: confusion, searching and eventual arrival into adulthood. LIMINAL asks a different question: what if coming-of-age does not guarantee arrival? This film season brings together contemporary Japanese and South Korean coming-of-age films without reducing the two national cinemas to a simple contrast between private emotion and social pressure. Instead, it compares how these films use different media and forms, from the symbolism and transformation of animation to the space, sound and everyday detail of live-action cinema, to make instability visible.
Through programming, the season invites audiences to feel that meaning does not sit inside one film alone. It emerges in the relationships between films. The three strands, Finding the Self, Nearness and Distance, and School, Pressure and Temporary Community, present youth not simply as self-discovery, but as an experience shaped by family, school, gender, friendship and the senses. The season does not try to define youth. It opens a space where uncertainty can be seen, compared and felt.
10Feature films
3Programme strands
2Countries
Strand 01
Finding the Self: Identity, Family and Space
Identity is not a completed answer, but something slowly shaped by family, living space, sensory difference and everyday pressure. From girls moving through silence at home and school to children looking for belonging in temporary houses, these films allow the self to form in the cracks of daily life. Growing up rarely means fully arriving.
House of Hummingbird
벌새
Identity
Year
2018
Country
South Korea
Director
Kim Bo-ra
Set in Seoul in the mid-1990s, the film follows a teenage girl as she drifts between school, family conflict and fleeting forms of intimacy. Its quiet attention to everyday gestures makes adolescence feel fragile and unresolved, while the heroine's search for recognition reveals how family, class and gender shape the question of who she is allowed to become.
Main cast
Park Ji-hu · Kim Sae-byuk · Jung In-gi · Lee Seung-yeon
Selected stills
Moving On
남매의 여름밤
Family
Year
2019
Country
South Korea
Director
Yoon Dan-bi
A brother and sister spend a summer in their grandfather's home after family instability forces them to relocate. The film uses the rhythms of domestic space to explore how children absorb adult uncertainty. Its gentle surface hides questions about separation, housing, memory and the uneasy process of growing into a changing family structure.
Main cast
Choi Jung-un · Park Seung-jun · Yang Heung-ju · Park Hyeon-young
Selected stills
Bori
나는보리
Senses
Year
2018/2019
Country
South Korea
Director
Kim Jin-yu
Bori is the only hearing member of a deaf family, and her difference makes belonging strangely complicated. The film places identity in the body, language and family communication rather than in abstract self-discovery. It asks how a child understands love when intimacy depends on a language she has not fully learned to inhabit.
Main cast
Kim Ah-song · Lee Rin-ha · Kwak Jin-seok · Heo Ji-na
Selected stills
The House of Us
우리집
Home
Year
2019
Country
South Korea
Director
Yoon Ga-eun
Three girls try to protect the fragile idea of home while the adults around them fail to offer stability. Through a child's point of view, the film turns housing, care and family rupture into questions of agency. It belongs in this strand because its young characters imagine futures by first trying to hold a present together.
Main cast
Kim Na-yeon · Kim Si-ah · Joo Ye-rim · Ahn Ji-ho
Selected stills
Strand 02
Nearness and Distance: Friendship, Loneliness and Belonging
Youth seeks recognition in relationships, but it is also wounded by relationships. A person can be close to others and still remain misunderstood; friendship can contain intimacy and loneliness at the same time. This strand focuses on failed communication, peer exclusion, shame, silence and relational harm that may not be fully repaired.
A Silent Voice
聲の形
Communication
Year
2016
Country
Japan
Director
Naoko Yamada
This animated drama follows a former bully who seeks forgiveness from a deaf classmate he once harmed. The film treats communication as both ethical and emotional work, showing how shame, disability and peer cruelty continue to shape young lives. Its central question is whether connection can be rebuilt after a community has failed someone.
Through the aftermath of a student's death, the film reconstructs a friendship marked by affection, pride, violence and misunderstanding. It refuses a simple explanation of tragedy, instead showing how teenage masculinity and emotional inarticulacy can turn closeness into harm. The film is a stark study of belonging that collapses from within.
Main cast
Lee Je-hoon · Seo Jun-young · Park Jung-min · Jo Sung-ha
Selected stills
The World of Us
우리들
Friendship
Year
2016
Country
South Korea
Director
Yoon Ga-eun
Two girls form an intense summer friendship that is tested when school hierarchies return. The film understands childhood friendship as a delicate negotiation of loyalty, class, jealousy and fear of exclusion. Its emotional precision makes small gestures feel decisive, showing how the wish to belong can make children both tender and cruel.
Main cast
Choi Soo-in · Seol Hye-in · Lee Seo-yeon · Kang Min-joon
Selected stills
Strand 03
School, Pressure and Temporary Community
School is not only the background of youth stories. It is an institutional space that assigns positions, visibility and pressure. An absent classmate, a fantasy of becoming a cat and a temporary band all show youth moving between rules, peer relations and the desire for expression. This strand also highlights the support and belonging that can emerge through brief encounters and shared work.
The Kirishima Thing
桐島、部活やめるってよ
Visibility
Year
2012
Country
Japan
Director
Daihachi Yoshida
When a popular volleyball player suddenly leaves his club, the school community begins to reveal its hidden hierarchies. The absent student becomes a centre of gossip, projection and anxiety. By shifting across multiple perspectives, the film turns the school into a system of observation where reputation is constantly produced and policed.
Main cast
Ryunosuke Kamiki · Ai Hashimoto · Suzuka Ohgo · Masahiro Higashide · Mayu Matsuoka
Selected stills
A Whisker Away
泣きたい私は猫をかぶる
Escape
Year
2020
Country
Japan
Director
Junichi Sato and Tomotaka Shibayama
This animated fantasy follows a girl who escapes the pain of being misunderstood by transforming into a cat. The film turns alternate identity into a way of thinking about pressure, intimacy and the wish to be loved without the risks of direct self-expression.
A group of high school girls form a band for a school festival and invite a Korean exchange student to become their vocalist. The film's relaxed rhythm makes music a space of expression, hesitation and cross-cultural connection. It closes the season on the possibility that performance can turn uncertainty into shared energy.
