Kani Releasing has picked up North American rights to Park Syeyoung‘s “The Fin” from Coproduction Office, with plans for both theatrical and home video release in 2026.
The film unfolds in a speculative future where the Korean peninsula has been reunified following a war, only to find itself environmentally gutted. In this world, a subspecies of mutated mermen known as Omegas are relegated to the lowest rungs of a water-starved society, pressed into menial labor and denied basic rights. The story is set in motion when a dying Omega asks a companion to seek out his daughter Mia, who has concealed her identity among the human population, so she can inherit his fin through a sacred rite. Running parallel is the arc of Sujin, a government worker portrayed by Kim Pureum, whose certainty in the ruling order begins to fracture as she hunts the Omega for reasons of her own.
Park announced himself with debut feature “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” (2022), a genre piece about a creature spawned from a discarded mattress, which swept the prizes at the Bucheon Film Festival, claimed the best director honor at the Seoul Independent Film Festival and earned a special jury mention at Fantasia. The film went on to screen at Sitges, Berlin Critics’ Week and Torino.
With “The Fin,” Park has been recognized for stretching the possibilities of low-budget digital filmmaking through bold, saturated imagery, expressive use of light and an inventive repurposing of decaying industrial spaces. Beneath its genre surface, the film mounts a pointed examination of xenophobia and social exclusion, refracted through the lens of Korea’s breakneck modernization and its attendant ecological and geopolitical anxieties.
“Set in a near-future Korea, ‘The Fin’ explores the contagion of fear and the making of myths,” Park said in a statement.
“I hope that people get the feeling that maybe what they see around them is not true. So they actively, not passively, reconsider what actually constitutes an Omega or not, which leads to how do we decide who is an Omega and who is not? How do we decide who is a human or not? And if anybody in the audience reaches that point of questioning what divides Omega and human, I think that the film has succeeded. It’s about stating two things and then showing that the statements are very volatile,” he told Variety at Locarno.
Of the acquisition, Park noted that Kani’s Ariel Esteban Cayer and Pearl Chan of Kani had accompanied the project for years, viewing early cuts and helping guide it toward completion.
Kani Releasing is a boutique North American distributor founded in 2021 with a focus on Asian cinema across both new releases and archival titles. Coproduction Office, which brokered the sale, is a Paris- and Berlin-based international sales and production outfit.
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