‘Hope’ Director Na Hong-Jin to Receive Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema at 25th New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF)

The New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), celebrating its landmark 25th edition, and Film at Lincoln Center will present the North American premiere of Hope, the final cut of the fourth feature from acclaimed South Korean director Na Hong-Jin (The Wailing, The Chaser, The Yellow Sea).

Director Na Hong-Jin is also the recipient of the 2026 Daniel A. Craft Award for Excellence in Action Cinema. Named for Dan Craft, a founder of the festival and a die-hard fan of action cinema, who died in 2013, the award honors filmmakers working at the highest level of the form he loved. HOPE is considered the largest and most relentless film of Director Na’s career, ten years after The Wailing. Previous recipients include Hong Kong action maestros Dante Lam (Operation Red Sea) and the legendary Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix, Blades of the Guardians).

Selected as the festival’s Centerpiece Film presented by NEON, the screening will take place on Monday, July 20, 2026, at 7:00 PM at the SVA Theatre, as part of NYAFF 2026, which runs July 10–26 across five New York venues anchored by Film at Lincoln Center. Hope also caps off NYAFF’s complete Na Hong-Jin retrospective, a rare chance to see all four of the director’s features, every one of which premiered at Cannes.

Mixing sci-fi, action, mystery, and the director’s trademark dark humor, the film follows the residents of Hope Harbor, from a weary police chief and his foul-mouthed sergeant to a ragtag group of hunters, as a mysterious presence emerges in the forests surrounding their quiet village. Like The Wailing, the film wrestles with fear of the unknown, mistaken assumptions, and the violence that grows from misunderstanding. “Ultimately, what this film hopes to explore and convey is the familiar adage that all the world’s tragedies stem from misunderstandings,” says Na. While audiences may come for the pulse-pounding genre spectacle, the director describes Hope simply as “a human drama.”

Hope brings together a marquee Korean cast led by Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, and Squid Game breakout Hoyeon in her feature film debut, alongside an international ensemble portraying the film’s mysterious visitors through performance capture: Academy Award nominee Michael Fassbender, Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell (Waves, Bones and All), and Cameron Britton (Mindhunter, Mickey 17). Shot across South Korea and the untouched wilderness of Romania’s Retezat National Park by cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (The Wailing, Parasite, Burning), the film is also scored by Michael Abels (Get Out, Nope). NEON will release HOPE in North America on Wednesday, September 9th.

NYAFF 2026 Spotlight on Na Hong-Jin Series

Alongside the premiere, NYAFF will present a retrospective of Na Hong-Jin’s earlier films, offering audiences the chance to revisit the work of a filmmaker who has spent nearly two decades pushing Korean genre cinema into stranger and darker territory. From his breakout debut The Chaser (2008, on 35mm), the relentless serial-killer thriller that premiered in Cannes’ Midnight Screenings section, to the brutal cross-border noir The Yellow Sea (2010, Un Certain Regard 2011) and the supernatural dread of The Wailing (2016, Out of Competition), each film expanded the boundaries of genre filmmaking in its own way. With Hope, his first film in Competition, NYAFF brings together all four of Na’s features for the first time, a fitting celebration of a filmmaker whose work has always been impossible to predict.

• The Chaser (2008) — Sunday, July 26, 5:45 PM SVA Theatre –  35mm
• The Yellow Sea (2010) — Sunday, July 19, 3:30 PM Korean Cultural Center New York
• The Wailing (2016) — Sunday, July 19, 9:30 PM SVA Theatre 
• HOPE (2026) —  Monday, July 20, 7:00 PM SVA Theatre — Centerpiece Presentation · North American Premiere · Intro & Q&A with Na Hong-Jin

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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