“This Film Is An Introduction To Korea’s Gay Community”: Park Joonho’s 3670 Is Paving The Way For Korean Queer Cinema

Since its release, the rising director’s 3670 has been unanimously praised, expanding the idea of what a Queer Korean film can be.

As Park Joonho reflects on what he has achieved in the past year, there’s a sense of  wonderment. Park has spent the better part of the last twelve months travelling between festivals, while his film 3670 racked up awards and nominations. “Speaking frankly, my short films didn’t have that achievement,” Park laughs, warm even in his self-deprecation, as he speaks to me from his house in Seoul. “And so I didn’t have many expectations for my first feature — but I was very, very happy.” While receiving praise for any of his works will have brought him joy, it feels particularly important for 3670. “It’s about Korea’s gay community. I wanted to show it all around the world. And thanks to many queer film festivals, I have.”

Since it premiered in April 2025 at the SFFILm Festival, 3670 has been shown everywhere from Seoul to San Francisco, from Poland to the Philippines – and was shown for the first time in the UK at London’s Queer East Festival on May 7th. The film follows Cheol-jun, a gay, North Korean defector who begins to find community within Seoul’s queer scene. The film was shot on location across Seoul’s queer spaces with mostly unknown actors, and has been called a “new landmark in Queer Korean cinema” by Queer East Festival director Yi Wang.

When he set out to make 3670, Park wanted to direct a film that paid homage to his own community. “In Korea, queer people are not recognised legally, and culturally we are not welcomed. And still, the Korean gay community’s culture is very diverse and very dynamic,” he reflects. Amongst “developed” countries, South Korea is seen as an outlier in its relationship to queerness. A 2025 survey showed 56% of South Koreans view homosexuality to be “morally unacceptable”, and South Korean law does not protect against discrimination based on gender identity or sexuality.  A lack of state support is coupled with a cultural legacy marked by erasure, leaving queer lives less represented on screen. “I think it’s very sad that our culture has not been recorded in cinema, so I wanted to do that,” says Park.

The filmmaker sat on a completed script for several years, believing that he did not have the courage to make the film. “I hadn’t come out to my parents,” he says. “And, at the time, I didn’t want to be the one who made a queer film.” But after hearing the story of Byun Hui-su on the news, Park found his resolve. Byun was South Korea’s first openly transgender soldier who fought to continue military service after her gender reassignment surgery. In July 2020, her request was denied, and less than a year later, Byun died by suicide aged 23. “After she died, I thought I should do something. That led me to make the film,” he says.

Although this story cemented Park’s desire to make 3670, he was still concerned with how the film would be received. “Even two or three years ago, if someone uploaded a video to YouTube talking about where the gay community hangs out, people would be very annoyed. They’d say: Don’t expose our community,” Park remembers. But, to Park’s surprise, when 3670 was released, it was immediately embraced by the queer community. “Korean audiences see that it’s our story, our characters, our lives that are in the film,” Park says. “They’re happy, so I’m happy.”

Now, 3670, sits within a lineage of queer Korean cinema, forerun by filmmakers like Lee-Song Hee-il and Kim-Jho Gwangsoo who directed No Regret and Boy Meets Boy respectively. “For that generation, filmmaking wasn’t just making movies – it was a kind of protest,” he reflects. But for Park, perhaps the biggest inspiration was Lee Hyuksang’s 2010 documentary Miracle on Jongno Street, which documented the lives of four gay men as they faced social stigma, fought for equality, and found community in Seoul’s Jongno district. While for younger generations, Park believes some of Korea’s early queer cinema can be “too heavy or too rigid,” he is quick to recognise their importance. “I think that generation created a very good grounding for the next generation,” he says. “Because of their cinema, I can be here. I am always very grateful for them”.

 It is for this reason that when Park was making 3670, he spent time thinking about how to create a film that stepped into what would become the next generation of queer cinema. He widened the film’s scope beyond a relationship between two people, focusing instead on the community in which queer people find themselves. He also wanted to move away from some of queer cinema’s more didactic tropes. “It can be very black and white. There’s always an enemy, always a character who doesn’t understand being gay, and there’s a character that doesn’t understand themselves. Am I gay? I don’t know? Am I not sure? That kind of character,” he laughs warmly. “I didn’t want Stage One characters.”

Park also wanted to explore individuals who were marginalised within the queer community. 3670’s main character is a defector who was born in North Korea before settling in Seoul. Before becoming a filmmaker, Park had volunteered as an English teacher to defectors, and he soon realised that their representation in films was very different to their real lives. As he reflected on the experiences of queer people and defectors, he also began to appreciate their similarities. “Race and gender are hard to hide. But gay people can pretend to be straight, and North Korean people can pretend to be locals,” he says. “Korea is a very exclusive society – there are many discriminations – and so people choose to hide”.

Park also found that, for both groups, there was a cinematic fascination with the trauma of their pasts. Queer cinema often focused on homophobic attacks, and depictions of defectors focused on their lives in North Korea – something that didn’t resonate with the reality of the defectors Park taught. When one of his students told him the story of how she crossed the border to South Korea, Park was shocked. She had almost died, had been shot at by soldiers — and yet she told the story as though it was no more dramatic than her commute to work. Park realised that although he was hearing her story for the first time, it was her distant past. She had lived in South Korea for over two decades. “That was a very big moment for me, and I knew I had to focus on their personal lives, their present lives,” he says.

While Park wanted to focus on his characters’ present, he also wanted to acknowledge the cultural history they sat within. Most of the film was shot on location in real queer venues, adding more than just realism. “I wanted to record in real places because they’re full of the gay community’s memories,” he explains. Both Jongno and Itaewon (Seoul’s gay districts) are suffering from rapid gentrification, and so Park knew that if he didn’t preserve them on film, there’d be a risk that no one would. “We filmed two years ago, and even now some of the places in the film have already closed,” he recalls. “I had to capture those places.”

When Park has spoken to audiences after screenings of 3670 – both queer and straight, Korean and foreign – he has been surprised to hear how many people saw their own struggles represented in Cheol-jun’s. “This film is about one individual, his loneliness, and his harsh relationship with the community and society. I think that feeling could be understood by everyone. I hope it is a comfort.” But Park doesn’t just want the film to be a comfort; it’s also an invitation into a world which has been historically overlooked. “This film is an introduction to Korea’s gay community,” the filmmaker concludes. “I hope people who watch this film will visit Seoul. That they’ll come to Jongno and Itaewon”.