Kunimura Jun wins best supporting actor and popular star award at South Korea's 37th Blue Dragon Film Awards

Kunimura Jun became the first non-Korean actor to win an award at the Blue Dragon Film Awards. During the presentation ceremony for the 37th edition of the awards held on 25 November, he got not one, but two awards i.e. best supporting actor and popular star for his performance in the Korean movie "Gokseong" (The Wailing). He was only the second foreign actor to be nominated in the film awards' history.

"Gokseong" is a suspense horror movie set in a rural village where Kunimura plays a stranger speaking Japanese who recently arrived there and lives on his own in the mountains by the village. Soon after, a mysterious sickness starts spreading among the villagers which causes violent murderous outbreaks and subsequent death. Police officer Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) meets a mysterious young woman Moo-myeong who informs him about the Japanese stranger's involvement with the deaths but she disappears later. After hearing a local hunter's eyewitness account of the stranger having eaten an animal in the mountains while being nearly naked and his eyes glowing in red, Jong-goo gets the help of another officer, a Japanese-speaking priest and a shaman Il-Gwang (Hwang Jung-min) to investigate the stranger.

When "Gokseong" was shown during the Cannes Film Festival this year, it attracted a lot of attention and was a box office hit in South Korea with close to 7 million cinema visits. At the Busan International Film Festival held in October, Kunimura's talk event attracted so many movie fans that they spilled out of the event venue.

"Gokseong" will be shown in Japan from 11 March 2017.

Sources: Oricon / Wikipedia