Hong Sang-soo and Kim Min-hee Win at Locarno Again

South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and actor Kim Min-hee have been honoured at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Hong won the Pardo for best direction for Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, while Kim received the Pardo for best performance, an award she shares with Italian actor Monica Bellucci for Kettice.

The film is Hong's 35th feature. Kim plays Sang-hee, a woman who travels to Jeju Island to find her divorced mother after a decade without contact. The screening marked Hong's fifth invitation to Locarno, one of Europe's key auteur-focused festivals.

The parallel wins extend a long-running pattern of recognition for the director and his frequent collaborator. Hong previously won Locarno's best director prize for Our Sunhi in 2013 and the festival's top Golden Leopard for Right Now, Wrong Then in 2015. Kim won the same best performance award at Locarno in 2024 for By the Stream.

Hong Sang-soo's Festival Streak and the Kim Min-hee Collaboration

Hong Sang-soo's Locarno Record

The awards extend one of the most consistent festival runs in contemporary Korean cinema. Hong works with small budgets, recurring actors and a loose, dialogue-driven style that has long found receptive juries at European festivals. The recognition suggests that this approach remains compelling to critical audiences even as Korean commercial filmmaking has become more globally mainstream.

There is no indication in the announcement of a commercial release plan, so the immediate impact is reputational rather than box-office driven. Still, each Locarno prize raises the film's profile among international distributors and festival programmers.

Kim Min-hee and Monica Bellucci's Shared Prize

Kim Min-hee's shared best performance prize with Monica Bellucci is significant because it places her work in a Korean-language film alongside an established European star in the same competition category. It also means Kim has now won Locarno's acting honour for the second time after By the Stream in 2024. The pattern reinforces how central the Hong-Kim collaboration has become to his current festival identity.