Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul
The Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, known by its acronym EXiS, was established in 2004 as a dedicated showcase for experimental moving image work in South Korea, making it one of the few festivals in East Asia to focus specifically on the expanded field of avant-garde film and video art rather than on conventional narrative or documentary forms. The festival is based in Seoul and has operated as an annual event bringing together international experimental cinema alongside work from South Korean artists and filmmakers working at the intersection of cinema, video, and contemporary art.
EXiS operates with a curatorial approach that treats film and video as media with their own formal histories and possibilities, separate from and sometimes in productive tension with mainstream cinema. The programming draws from structural film, expanded cinema, artists' moving image, single-channel video art, and hybrid forms that resist easy categorisation. This breadth is the festival's defining characteristic - EXiS does not restrict itself to any single tradition within experimental film but maps the field broadly, from works rooted in the North American and European avant-garde traditions to practices emerging from South Korean and East Asian contemporary art contexts.
The connection to experimental cinema as understood within genre film culture is real and meaningful. Experimental and avant-garde techniques have been central to surreal and formally radical horror and genre work across film history, and EXiS's programming has at various points included work that engages with horreur as a formal rather than merely narrative register - films in which dread, bodily unease, and the confrontation with death operate through image and sound rather than through story. The festival's openness to darkness in experimental form connects it to the broader genre cinema world even when its programming sits outside conventional festival genre categories.
The South Korean context is significant. South Korea has produced a remarkable volume of cinema across genres over the past three decades, with internationally recognised work in thriller, horror, and genre fiction alongside a strong tradition of formally ambitious art cinema. EXiS positions itself at the experimental and art cinema end of this spectrum, providing a platform for Korean artists working in moving image forms that might not fit elsewhere in the South Korean festival landscape, which is dominated by larger international events focused on narrative features.
The festival is organised by a non-profit structure and has maintained a consistent presence in Seoul's cultural landscape since its founding. The programming typically includes international selections curated to represent current directions in experimental moving image practice alongside a Korean programme highlighting local and regional work. Screenings are accompanied by catalogue documentation and, at various points, by symposia and artist talks that situate individual works within broader conversations about the moving image.
EXiS has built connections with international experimental film networks, including relationships with other dedicated experimental film events in Europe and North America, which feed into its programming and give it a presence in the international experimental film circuit beyond its home territory. South Korean artists whose work has screened at EXiS have gone on to exhibit in major international contemporary art contexts, and the festival has played a role in building infrastructure for experimental film culture in a country where that infrastructure is less developed than in Western Europe or North America.
For anyone tracing the relationship between experimental cinema and genre filmmaking - the ways psychological horror borrows from structural film, or the ways surreal formal experimentation blurs into uncanny horror - EXiS represents a genuinely important node in the international festival landscape, one rooted in Seoul but connected to a global conversation about what moving images can do beyond conventional narrative.
