Which actress will win the Best Actress Award at the 52nd Daejong Award?
The competition is close. Kim Yun Jin Kim Hye Soo, Uhm Jung Hwa, Jun Ji Hyun and Han Hyo Joo are competing for the award but for many critics, the race is really between Jun Ji Hyun, Kim Yun Jin and Kim Hye Soo for their film roles.
The Daejong Awards consider which film was the most successful. So, the stars of Jun Ji Hyun's "The Assassination," Kim Yun Jin's "Ode To My Father" and Kim Hye Soo's "Coin Locker Girl" have an edge. Each of those movies sold at least a million tickets.
Jun Ji Hyun played a sniper working with Korean resistance activists in the espionage action film "The Assassination." She is such a good assassin that the resistance breaks her out of jail to take out some Japanese senior officials. The film sold over $3 million on its opening day. Not bad for an actress once considered "box office poison." Her career revived dramatically after she appeared in the film "The Thieves" and the drama "You Who Came From The Stars," both with Kim Soo Hyun. Jun said she could not resist playing the sniper.
"I thought that it was a character that can hardly be found in Korean films and a rare chance for me to play it," Jun said in an interview with the media outlet Korea Times. "As an actress, I didn't want to be a flaw for the character."
Kim Yun Jin, also known as Yunjin Kim, works as an actress in Korea and the U.S., recently signing on to her fourth season on the American series "The Mistresses."
In "Ode To My Father" she plays a migrant worker displaced by the Korean War. It was an experience that Kim knew all too well from her own childhood.
"My parents were deep in my thoughts, as well as my own experience growing up in a foreign country and the loneliness that only immigrants can feel. It was extremely inspiring," said Kim in an interview with the Hollywood reporter.
Kim Hye Soo is up for her role in "Coin Locker Girl." In the film she plays Mother, the boss of a loan shark and organ trafficking ring in Chinatown, Incheon. Despite her cold and calculating side, she raises an orphan. But that orphan grows up to reject her.
The film is the recipient of several awards, including the Jury's Choice Award at the 19th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, a Gryphon Award and the British Film Institute Certificate at the 2015 Giffoni Film Festival in Italy.
Kim Hye Soo, whose last film was "The Face Reader," considered her "Coin Locker Girl" role of Mother to be a challenge.
"It was an unfamiliar experience, but every time I stepped onto the set I could feel a surge of excitement," Kim said in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo. "Even when I had to spend two to three hours to get dressed up for filming, I could feel a strange sense of excitement that I had to suppress when I was acting."
Which actress will win? In a few days film fans will know. The awards ceremony will be broadcast live on November 20.
