Kim Yun Shin Punches In opens with the camera arriving at an empty gravesite somewhere in South America, and the first caption appears: “Prologue: A Foretold Grave.” It then cuts straight to the vibrant image of Kim Yunshin cutting down a tree with a chainsaw. Here is a portrait of an artist in whom the weight of nearly a century seems nowhere to be felt. Born in Wonsan in 1935, Kim is one of Korea’s first-generation female sculptors. At 49, she gave up her professorship and left for Argentina, spending the next 40 years working in South America, following trees, stones, and raw gemstones. Then, at 90, she returned to Korea. That is where this film begins. Lim Sunae, director of An Old Lady and Ms. Apocalypse, dedicates her first documentary to a figure who is calmer, more intense, infinitely freer, and more marvelous than the heroines of her fiction films. Is this a film about a great artist? Kim works as naturally as she breathes and finds joy in her work. Rather than being great, she simply wishes to work longer and to make more. Merely watching her life unfold makes something stir within us. Lim gathers all her admiration into the unfinished sentence in the epilogue: “Tomorrow as well, Kim Yunshin will...”
She graduated from Hongik University with a degree in Advertising and Multimedia Design and studied Screenwriting for Film at the Korea National University of Arts. After working as a script supervisor, screenwriter, and storyboard artist, she made her feature directorial debut with An Old Lady (2019), which won the KNN Audience Award in the New Currents competition at the 2019 Busan International Film Festival, the Best Director Award at the 2020 Women in Film Korea Festival, and the Park Nam-ok Award at the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival. She went on to direct Ms. Apocalypse (2024) and Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club for the Brokenhearted, the Competition film of the 2025 Busan International Film Festival.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
