Kani Releasing has acquired the North American rights to Park Se-young’s “The Fin” from the co-production agency and plans to release it both theatrically and on home video in 2026.
The film takes place in a speculative future where the Korean peninsula is unified after the war, but finds its environment in ruins. In this world, a mutated subspecies of merman known as Omegas are relegated to the lowest rung of society, forced to do menial labor and denied basic rights due to water scarcity. The story begins when a dying Omega asks his companions to find his daughter Mia, who has hidden her identity among humans, in order to inherit his fins through a sacred ritual. The story of Soo-jin, a civil servant played by Kim Py-reum, is also told in parallel. As Sujin pursues Omega for her own reasons, her confidence in the ruling order begins to waver.
Director Park made his debut with “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae” (2022), a genre piece depicting a creature born from a discarded mattress, which swept the awards at the Bucheon Film Festival, won the Best Director Award at the Seoul Independent Film Festival, and won the Special Jury Award for Fantasia. The film was also shown in Sitges, the Berlin Critics’ Week, and Turin.
With The Finn, Park is known for expanding the possibilities of low-budget digital filmmaking through bold, saturated imagery, expressive use of light, and inventive repurposing of dilapidated industrial spaces. Beneath its genre surface, the film contains an incisive examination of xenophobia and social exclusion, refracted through the lens of South Korea’s breakneck modernization and its attendant ecological and geopolitical anxieties.
Director Park said in a statement, “The Finn, set in near-future South Korea, explores the contagion of fear and the formation of myths.”
“We want people to feel a sense that what they see around them might not be real, so they actually reconsider who is an omega or not, not passively, but actively. That goes into how we decide who is an omega and who is not. “How do we determine who is human and who is not? And I think the film is successful if it gets to the point where someone in the audience wonders what separates an omega from a human, and that’s saying two things and showing that that statement is very unstable,” he said. Variety of Locarno.
Regarding the acquisition, Park noted that Kani City’s Ariel Esteban Kaier and Pearl Chan have been with the project for years, inspecting early cuts and guiding it toward completion.
Kani Releasing is a North American specialty distribution company founded in 2021 with a focus on Asian films, both new releases and archival titles. The sale was brokered by Coproduction Office, an international sales and production company based in Paris and Berlin.
