On its 25th day of release, IM Heung-soon’s documentary Factory Complex crossed the 10,000 admissions mark, a significant milestone for an arthouse non-fiction work in Korea. As of Thursday, September 10th, the film has attracted 10,793 viewers (USD 68,780).

 

IM’s sophomore work explores the plight of female workers in Asia but particularly contemporary Korea, across many employment sectors. The film premiered in the Wide Angle section of the Busan International Film Festival last year and subsequently earned the Silver Lion from the 56th International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, where it screened in the ‘All the World’s Futures’ exhibition. The film was awarded for being, according to the Biennale jury, a “moving video work that probes the nature of precarity in relation to the conditions of labor for women across Asia. Factory Complex takes the form of a documentary but with a direct, lightly mediated, encounter with his subjects and their working conditions.”

 

The result is a significant improvement over the performance of his debut Jeonju International Film Festival-premiered Jeju Prayer, which attracted 2,308 viewers (USD 13,345) during its release in 2013.

 

Factory Complex has proven popular on the international film festival circuit, earning invites to the Shanghai International Film Festival, the Montreal World Film Festival and the Korean Film Festival in Australia, in addition to other domestic events such as the Seoul Independent Film Festival and Docs Port Incheon.