Official selectionActor of the Year, Seung-ho KANG
Family/ChildLove/RomanceSF/Fantasy
Hyeonji (Jang Serim), an assistant producer for a YouTube channel, and Jihyeon (Kang Seung-ho), a struggling actor, continue living together while grappling with anxieties about the present and the future. When Hyeonji’s father dies suddenly and Jihyeon’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, they find themselves overwhelmed. In Cosmic Trace, death - or the state just before it - is akin to what remains as someone’s world, their own universe, disappears: the vivid marks left by a life as it fades away. These traces of life and death, tiny and fine as dust, may be invisible to the eye, yet they undeniably exist somewhere, hovering between the visible and the invisible. The beginning and end of this world are never clearly marked. Coincidence and necessity, the fleeting moment and eternity, reality and fantasy flow into one another, overlapping and layering upon each other. The film delicately shapes all of this through cinematic language, the materiality of film itself, and the audiovisual textures and effects of cinema. Here is the everyday as science fiction, and science fiction in the everyday.
Jang Woojin was born in 1985. His debut feature, A Fresh Start (2014), won the Grand Prize in Korean Competition at the Jeonju International Film Festival and was also selected for the Filmmakers of the Present Competition at the Locarno Film Festival. He produced, directed, and shot his second feature, Autumn, Autumn (2016), which earned him the Vision-Director’s Award at the Busan International Film Festival and was also invited to the Berlinale. His third feature Winter’s Night (2018) received awards for Best Director and Best Actress at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Cosmic Trace is his fourth feature film.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
