Tag: cold

Tallinn 2022 Kids Animation Programme – part 3

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Self-contained fable Birth Of The Oases (Marion Jamault, France, 9 mins) is a near-perfect portrayal of a symbiotic relationship. The cold-blooded hilltop snake struggles to keep warm while the two-humped camel is constantly exhausted by the desert’s heat. They come to a mutually helpful agreement whereby the cold snake takes up residence on the camel’s humps. This warms up the snake and cools down the camel. After the camel dies from old age, the snake moves around the sand dunes – here designed to look like a never ending series of camels humps – to create first water and later full blown oases which, according to the armadillo revealed as the narrator at the very end, to this very day.

In the black and white classroom of the black and white world of The Boy And The Elephant (Sonia Gerbeaud, France, 7 mins), black and white kids taunt someone who is different – a boy with an elephant head who is coloured blue. One kid, though, takes an interest – a boy who is coloured red, and the two embark on a playground friendship which could be read as a gay relationship, a state threatened by the red boy’s need to conform and revert to fit in with the black and whites. Eventually, a black and white girl takes pity on the elephant head, accepts him and he is subsumed into the group.

Marea (Guilia Martinelli, Switzerland, 5 mins) is another self-contained fable about a family living on an island within an hermetically sealed dome.

Stop-frame marvel Laika & Nemo (Jan Gaderman/Sebastian Gadow, Germany, 15 mins), arguably my favourite film in the programme, again concerns an outsider – a boy who lives in a lighthouse who is regularly tormented by fellow pupils and local fishermen at the harbour for wearing deep sea diving gear. When an astronaut crashes his spaceship near the lighthouse, the two helmet-wearers bond which puts them in a good place for when one of those local fishermen drops a key into the harbour.

Last but not least, The Queen Of The Foxes (Marina Rosset, Switzerland, 9 mins) is a French tale about the saddest member of a group of foxes who is, perhaps for that reason, made their queen. The other foxes’ inability to write hampers their attempts at writing such a letter to cheer her up. Instead, they steal from the nearby town all the love letters people have never been brave enough to send, delivering one which results in the uniting of a happy human couple who write their own letter to the fox queen thanking her for their efforts, which finally does the trick. The foxes then deliver the other letters, and the town windows suddenly become full of lively couples, straight, gay, even a threesome.

Which goes to show that programmes of kids animation can be a lot dirtier than you might expect.

The third of three programmes of Kids Animation shorts plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

North Korean Partisan In South Korea (Nambugun)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Based on the Korean War memoirs of Lee Tae (Ahn Sung-ki), a former North Korean news agency correspondent who fought for the North Korean partisans, this is a long and gruelling account of the Korean War, a South Korean production exploring a North Korean perspective. We rarely see inside the ranks of the South Korean forces. The partisans are all ‘comrades’ and women as well as men number among their ranks.

Inevitably, romantic attachments occur, although these are frowned upon and quickly quashed by superior officers. Which leaves separated parties desperate for news of their transferred objects of affection.

One particularly arresting sequence has Northern partisans shooting at Southern soldiers across an area of farmland until a child, seemingly oblivious to the very concept of warfare, wanders into the crossfire area. Both sides halt their shooting and come to a recognition of the humanity of the other. And that they both want the same thing: a unified Korea. Then the horrified farmer’s wife wanders into the area to rescue the child.

Elsewhere, though, the enemy is more distant: shooters to avoid and targets to hit. There are disturbing hints that Communism is an ideology to be blindly followed rather than seriously discussed. Perhaps this reflects something of the totalitarian nature of what North Korea later became as well as a South Korean perspective on the situation – very different from a more Western view of ideologically motivated conflicts elsewhere, such as the revolutionary Spanish Civil War soldiers’ left wing debates in Land And Freedom (Ken Loach, 1995).

Much of the film takes place in extremely bleak, Korean winter conditions. Cold and starvation are never far away. One character has an infected leg turn black from the knee downwards. It must be amputated – and all that’s to hand is an axe. That done, it leaves the man in question unable to travel on with his fellow partisans. Should he surrender? Should he commit suicide rather than falling into enemy hands?

Despite its well over two hours running length, this never outstays its welcome. It conveys a real sense of what warfare must have been like in the mountainous Korean terrain and as such makes for compelling viewing. It was made at a time when South Korea was lurching uneasily towards democracy following the mass protests of 1987: its attempt to get inside the heads of North Korean fighters would probably not have been condoned some five years previously. The earlier Piagol (Lee Kang-cheon, 1955), also in this year’s LKFF, apparently takes a far more anti-Communist stance in its depiction of North Korean partisans.

North Korean Partisan In South Korea plays as part of a strand showcasing director Chung Ji-Young at the 2023 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 18th to Sunday, October 29th. Showing on Friday, October 20th, 20:00, at the Odeon Luxe West End, Screen 2; you can buy tickets here. Watch the strand trailer below:

In 2019, it played in the London Korean Film Festival.