Jean-Claude Rousseau: 2026 Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS) Retrospective

About the Exhibition

Co-organized by the MMCA and the Seoul International Experimental Film Festival Committee, this program introduces 25 works by Jean-Claude Rousseau (b. 1946), a master of French experimental cinema. It is the first extensive survey in Korea of Rousseau's cinematic world across more than 40 years, from his 1983 debut Une jeune fille lit une lettre à la fenêtre to his 2024 recent work Where Are All My Lovers. Born in Paris, Rousseau encountered the films of Yasujiro Ozu and American avant-garde cinema during his time in New York in the 1970s, and took Robert Bresson's restrained cinematic language, the light of Vermeer's paintings, and Ozu's static compositions as reference points for his own cinematic aesthetics. The program screens works ranging widely from early to recent, including his signature work The Enclosed Valley (1995), Marseille International Documentary Film Festival Grand Prize winner In His Apartment (2007), and Just Before the Rain, shot in Jeonju in 2003 (2003).