Two KBS Productions Just Won Top Prizes at the Tokyo Women Film Festival

Two Korean Broadcasting System productions have won major awards at the Tokyo Women Film Festival — a result that places South Korean public television at the center of international film recognition in Japan this season.

KBS announced that its documentary We Will Not Say Goodbye (작별하지 않는다) received the Best International Film award, while the drama special The Official Records It (사관은 논한다) took home the Best Director prize. Both productions competed in the Tokyo Women Film Festival, an international competition based in Tokyo that focuses on works distinguished by strong storytelling, social impact, and directorial craft.

The Documentary That Covered 100 Days of Grief

We Will Not Say Goodbye was produced by KBS's Gwangju regional bureau as a special documentary marking the 100th day since the Jeju Air crash at Muan International Airport — a disaster in South Korea that claimed multiple lives and prompted significant public grief. The documentary team, led by director Cho Na-young, began filming on the day of the accident and continued through the 100-day mourning period, following bereaved families in their day-to-day lives.

The film's approach was deliberately intimate rather than journalistic. Rather than providing a news summary of the crash and its aftermath, the production chose to record what the families experienced in the spaces between public events — the ordinary moments in which a loss of that scale makes itself felt. The jury's citation noted that the documentary treated the tragedy not as a single event but as an ongoing communal experience that South Korean society carries collectively.

Veteran actor Han Seok-gyu, one of the country's most respected performers, provided narration for the documentary. His voice, described in press materials as restrained and calm, was selected specifically to avoid the kind of heightened emotional signaling that might push audiences toward a predetermined response. The effect, according to those who screened the film ahead of its broadcast, was a production that allowed grief to exist without being directed.

The Drama Special That Won for Direction

The Best Director award went to director Lee Ga-ram for The Official Records It, a single-episode drama special written by Im Eui-jung. The story is set in a historical court context and centers on a conflict between a young court official, Nam Yeo-gang (played by Tang Jun-sang), who is committed to preserving accurate historical records, and a crown prince (played by Nam Da-reum) who seeks to erase or rewrite those records to advance his own political position.

The premise is a compressed but high-stakes moral drama: two young men, each with real institutional power, in direct opposition over what the official historical record will say. The jury's citation highlighted the density and precision of the direction, noting that the drama managed to sustain genuine dramatic tension within a single-episode format that typically limits the scope of what's possible. The script's focus on the idea that documentation is itself a form of power gave the story relevance beyond its historical setting.

Tang Jun-sang, who plays the young official at the center of the conflict, has developed a strong profile in Korean television in recent years through prominent roles in several major productions. His casting in the drama special was noted at the time of the original broadcast as a signal that KBS was investing in high-profile talent for its smaller-scale programming, rather than reserving it exclusively for primetime series.

Korean Public Television at International Festivals

The twin wins for KBS at the Tokyo Women Film Festival add to a growing record of South Korean public television receiving international recognition in contexts beyond the more widely reported streaming success of Korean drama and content. While productions from platforms like Netflix Korea and JTBC have attracted the most global attention in recent years, KBS — the country's primary public broadcaster — has quietly maintained a track record of producing documentary and special drama content that performs well in festival settings.

The Tokyo Women Film Festival, while smaller than the major international film festivals, has a specific mandate to recognize works that center on storytelling from a women's perspective and that engage with socially meaningful subjects. Both of the winning KBS productions fit that mandate: a documentary about collective grief centered on family survivors, and a historical drama focused on the ethics of documentation and institutional power.

Both We Will Not Say Goodbye and The Official Records It are available on KBS's domestic on-demand platform. The awards will be formally presented as part of the festival's closing ceremony.