The Urban Suite, a 2014 short co-directed by Sébastien Simon and Forest Ian Etsler, is listed in the Itaewon Film Festival’s 2026 selections. The film records Seoul’s Gyonam-dong, then facing redevelopment, in four narratives.
The directors
France-born Sébastien Simon and Indiana-born Forest Ian Etsler co-directed The Urban Suite.
The festival’s 2026 biographies describe Simon as a filmmaker who teaches at Dongseo University in Busan and a programmer for the Busan International Short Film Festival. Etsler is a filmmaker based in Seoul’s Mangwon-dong.
Gyonam-dong in 2014
The film follows four narratives in Gyonam-dong, a neighborhood inside Seoul’s old city walls. It shows an alley filled with discarded furniture, apartment blocks seen through a window and objects left in emptied rooms, tracing what people and places leave behind as a city changes.
Simon released the 12-minute, 30-second original in 2014. Its redevelopment scenes record that period and do not show the neighborhood as it is in 2026.
Later work
The directors’ interest in changing Korean neighborhoods continued. The Old, The New and The Other, a 2022 film set in Mipo, Busan, credits Simon as director and Etsler as a cast member.
The Urban Suite appears in the Itaewon Film Festival’s official 2026 selections. The original film can be watched in the creator’s player on this page.
The Urban Suite (2014), 12:30. Co-directed by Sébastien Simon and Forest Ian Etsler; original upload by Sébastien Simon / Vimeo. Unmodified provider preview: CC BY 3.0. Source and license links below.
