In September, at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, the Best Actress award went to Meiwen for her role in Chai Shangjun’s Chinese film Our Sunlight Above Our Heads. Notably, the film’s cinematographer is Kim Hyun-seok, a Korean. This underscores Kim Hyun-seok’s standing as a cinematographer whose work has earned top prizes at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin.

Kim Hyun-seok’s career includes collaborations with Lee Chang-dong on Poetry, which earned the Cannes 2010 Best Screenplay Award, and Wang Xiaoshai’s To My Son, which swept Best Actor and Best Actress at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in 2019. These achievements, along with the recognition for his other works, mark him as a photographer whose frames have consistently aligned with festival-winning cinema.

Cine21 later visited Busan International Film Festival with Our Sunlight and reached out to Kim Hyun-seok to learn about his twenty-year journey—a path that has spanned multiple countries and involved collaborations with creators from various nationalities. In 2017, Wang Xiaosai sought to work with a cinematographer he admired and pursued Kim Hyun-seok; the outreach was facilitated by a Chinese film scholar, Fan Suqing, who is regarded as a Chinese expert on Korean cinema and connected through Lee Chang-dong’s circle. From virtual meetings to in-person exchanges, Kim felt common ground with Wang Xiaosai and ultimately participated in To My Son, signaling a broader cross-border phase in his career.