Film archive, 2025

Ikaino

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Director LEE Wonsik

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

‘Ikaino’ refers to a neighborhood in Osaka, Japan, home to a large community of Zainichi Koreans. Though erased from official records over fifty years ago, its name still carries memories and stories. Ikaino follows four generations of Zainichi Koreans who built their lives selling vegetables, meat, offal, and clothes at the Tsuruhashi Market. Spanning from the Japanese colonial era through liberation, the Jeju April 3rd Uprising, the Korean War, and the repatriation of Zainichi Koreans to North Korea, to the present day where hate speech and the Korean Wave coexist, the people of Ikaino have lived with a heightened sense of Korean identity, more acutely than Koreans themselves. In particular, the spirited tales of Bu Youngcheol, a butcher who nearly became a yakuza, leave a strong impression. This exceptional chronicle unfolds like an epic, condensing the weight of numerous films and books into one vivid, detailed narrative that surpasses history books.