Tag: Seoul

Bloodline (Hyeol-maek)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Widower of some three years standing Kim An-dong (Kim Seung-ho) has done alright for himself in the mining business in Hokkaido, but now it’s after the Second World War, the occupying Japanese have been thrown out of Korea and he’s come back to Seoul where he lives with his grown up son Kim Geo-buk (Shin Seong-il, the lead in A Day Off, Lee Man-hee, 1968, and a huge Korean star).

The Kims are one of three families in a ramshackle set of basic houses sharing a courtyard. Ggangtong (Choi Nam-hyun) lives with his wife Ongmae (Hwang Jung-seun) and daughter Bok-sun (Um Aing-ran) to whom Geo-buk has taken a shine. Ggangtong’s first wife having died, Ongmae is the girl’s stepmother and is teaching her to sing bar songs so she can make herself and the girl’s father a lot of money via prostitution. The girl is understandably upset about this and instead goes out with Geo-buk to sell socks to soldiers at the nearby U.S. Army base where his dad, seeing the Americans as the most secure source of income in the area, wants him to get a job. Sitting by the railway at night, the young couple talk about getting work in the textile factory at Yeongdeungpo as a possible route out of their economic troubles.

The third family comprises two brothers, one married, one unmarried. The older Won-pal (Shin Young-kyun) makes a meagre living out of scavenging bomb parts left over from the war. His wife (Lee Kyoung-hee), meanwhile, is extremely ill but Won-pal has no money to pay any doctor to even examine her, let alone find a cure, so she lies on the floor all day, barely moving. There’s a suggestion that the physical disabilities of both his wife and young daughter (Lee Gyeong-rim) have been caused by his ill-judged attempts to make money.

Won-pal‘s younger brother Won-chil (Choi Moo-ryong) went to university in Japan and has come back with the desire to write novels, “as if that’s going to put anything on the table”, as his infuriated older brother comments. When Won-chil is around, the pair seem to argue constantly. Their mother (Song Mi-nam) takes refuge in singing Christian hymns, citing Jesus’ words about “in my father’s house are many mansions” – pretty ironic given the family’s cramped housing conditions. If any other members of the family share her faith, they don’t show it.

Won-chil has been trying to find paying work – but nothing has come of it. He’s also having problems with the girl he likes, Ok-hui (Kim Ji-mee). To survive, she is having a relationship with an American soldier since the G.I.s seem to be the only people around with a decent income. Meanwhile, one Madam Hwasan interests An-dong in buying from her a 29 year old potential bride, a refugee who has come down from the North (where the Chinese communists are in power). The economy is on its knees and the sex trade in its various forms seems to be one of the few areas that’s flourishing economically.

There is a bright light on the horizon, however, in that the young couple eventually get jobs at the textile factory and are seen as facing an optimistic future together, so much so that Geo-buk writes to ask both fathers to come and visit them there. It’s as if the film is trying to paint a rosy picture of Korea going forward, particularly through its young, post-war generation. There’s a lot of darkness here, but the country is going to move out of it and everything’s going to be all right. After some of the bleak material earlier, you wonder if the happy ending is just that little bit too pat. Nevertheless as a picture of the immediate post-war period in Korea made about a decade and a half later on, it serves as fascinating viewing today.

The film is also known under the English title Kinship.

Bloodline plays Regent Street Cinema, 03 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Book here. Watch the Festival trailer below:

A Day Off (Hyuil)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Shot in stark black and white, this opens with a voice-over which immediately makes you think you’re watching a film noir. However, A Day Off is something else entirely – there are no cops or gangsters in sight, the narrative concerning instead a couple of doomed lovers and the opening voice-over bemoaning the hero’s meeting with his lover Ji-Yeon every Sunday. That said, it is all about poor people struggling to survive on Seoul’s mean streets and the main character is constantly cheating his fellow citizens or stealing money from them, so its subject matter is not entirely noir unrelated.

Heo-uk (Shin Seong-il, a huge star who also has a bit part in the earlier Bloodline a.k.a. Kinship, Kim Soo-yong, 1963) asks a consults a bird fortune-teller as to what the day will bring: her trained bird picks out a card warning him to Stay Away From Women. To get to his rendezvous with Ji-Yeon (Jeon Ji-youn) with scarcely any cash, he pulls a double con on a cab driver and a stall selling cigarettes to avoid paying his fare. Later, in dire need of money to pay a debt, he tries to wheedle it out of a drinking buddy. Later still, Heo-uk drops in on old school friend Gye-je so bored that he’s already had six baths that day and robs him of both the cash in his jacket pocket and the watch lying atop it before scarpering. This act will come back to bite him at the end when Gye-je catches up with him towards the narrative’s end and beats him up.

The main event, though, is the romance. Heo-uk meets Ji-Yeon in an alleyway and takes her to a deserted public park. It’s winter and there are no leaves on the trees. She talks about all the things they could have if only they weren’t so poor. They both berate themselves, He slaps her. It turns out she’s pregnant and needs the money to have what she coyly terms “an operation”. After robbing Gye-je, Heo-uk takes Ji-Yeon to the abortion clinic where the doctor warns him she wouldn’t be able to have the baby for health reasons and recommends an abortion. Once the operation is under way, Heo-uk goes to an up-market bar to get drunk and pick up the first woman he lays eyes on, the pair binge drinking their way through several bars before spending the night together on a building site.

Despite the weepy, romantic music when the couple are in the park together, this plays out as a brutal and hard hitting slice of life. Director Lee has an extraordinary eye and there’s always something going on visually – when the couple walk along the edge of the park, for example, the horizontals and verticals of the fencing preventing people from falling several feet into a ditch speak of inhuman, industrial production and an environment where people feel almost an afterthought. And towards the end, scenes of the hero walking in darkness are contrasted with visually far brighter images of him alone with his girlfriend in happier times.

The film is both utterly compelling and a real downer, showing as it does the human condition at its very worst and most meaningless. The South Korean authorities were not pleased: they demanded changes. When director Lee refused to make any, they refused the film a release. Now widely considered his masterpiece, it remained undiscovered until the Korean Film Archive unearthed it in 2005. When you see it, you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard of this film before. Absolutely unmissable.

A Day Off plays Regent Street Cinema, 02 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF).

Wednesday, November 2nd, 14.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 15.30, Home, Manchester – book here.

Watch the festival trailer below:

House Of Hummingbird (Beol-Sae)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.

Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.

This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”

.

Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.

Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.

She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.

A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.

Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.

When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.

It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.

House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Two Doors (Doo gae-eui moon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The story of the Yongsan tragedy. Yongsan is an area of Central Seoul which had been the site of a US military base and the infrastructure such as bars and prostitution which had grown up around it. Once the US military decamped to another area, the developers hoped to move in and regenerate the area. For ‘regenerate’ read ‘gentrify’, a situation not entirely unfamiliar in parts of the UK at present. In Yongsan, when some tenants in one particular housing block refused to move out, activists seized on this and helped stage a protest.

Instead of listening to their grievances as the protesters would have hoped, the authorities surrounded the block with police whose presence only served to aggravate the protesters into throwing firebombs. The police subsequently stormed the building with intent to remove the protesters who barricaded themselves inside and whose last stand would take place in a lookout structure on the roof of the building.

With water cannon concentrated on both the block and the lookout, a SWAT team was lowered onto the roof in a container carried by a crane and the protesters retreated into the lookout. Tensions were high on both sides when the lookout suddenly burst into flames. The ensuing inferno claimed the lives of five protesters and one police officer. Initially, no-one was quite sure what had happened.

A court case followed. It concluded that the police operation had been necessary to uphold the rule of law and incarcerated four protesters who’d managed to survive the fire.

The Pinks film making collective didn’t think these arguments were good enough and set out to make a documentary about the incident. The surviving protesters being in prison weren’t available for interviews, so all the filmmakers had to work with was the footage shot by journalists and police at the incident plus audio recordings of the trial. There are also a few interviews of people on the protesters’ side.

Out of these limited materials came an extraordinary film. You feel like you’re watching the tragedy unfold in real time with commentary after the event trying to piece together exactly what happened. What emerges for a viewer unfamiliar with recent Korean political history is a terrifying picture of a repressive, right wing regime where ordinary people are stamped on in no uncertain terms.

The police going inside the building and the SWAT team airlifted in by container are clearly under extreme pressure. This is one of those cinematic experiences where you believe one group (the police) to be in the wrong, yet at the same time they’re in an impossible situation and you feel for their plight. That doesn’t render their actions right, correct or good, but it does in some sense put you alongside them and elicit a degree of sympathy.

As documentaries go, this is a must see and whilst it obviously would have a particular resonance for a South Korean audience, for an international one it transcends such concerns with its picture of a repressive regime and the toll exacted from those charged with maintaining it on the ground. Although it’s a very different situation, UK residents will recall the Grenfell Tower tragedy too.

Two Doors plays in the London Korean Film Festival. A follow-up film The Remnants was made by the Pinks film making collective five years later and is also showing at the Festival.

The Remnants (Gong-Dong-Jeong-Beom)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Set to open in Korea in 2018, this is the follow-up documentary to Two Doors (Kim il-rhan/ Hong Ji-you, 2012) about the Yongsan tragedy in which a policeman and five protesters were killed in a fire atop a housing block during a protest. One of the limitations imposed on that film was the incarceration of those protesters that escaped the burning rooftop lookout atop the Yongsan building. Viewers of the first film kept asking what had happened to these people.

The short answer is: four years after originally being sentenced, they were pardoned and released. This meant that they were now available to tell their own stories, so Kim and Lee from the Pinks film making collective and their crew started talking to them on camera. Slowly, a second film started to emerge. It’s not exactly a sequel, more a follow up. Which is to say, it’s dealing with different aspects of the same story but constructed around a different template and operating within a dissimilar set of parameters.

In the process, this second instalment starts to unpack elements that were never fully explained in the first film. For one thing, the rooftop lookout is now described as a simple structure erected by the protesters themselves rather than an original architectural feature, with interview material of the rigger who oversaw its construction.

This second doc also explores areas into which the first’s limitations prevented it from venturing. One question is that of how the fire in the lookout actually started in the first place. Two Doors drew upon a number of sources. The exterior footage shows the structure unexpectedly, suddenly burst into flames with no obvious visual clue as to why. There’s no police footage of what occurred inside the structure presumably because cameras were turned off when the Swat team moved onto the roof. The official report which formed a major part of the evidence in the court case goes suspiciously quiet when it comes to this part of the operation. It was something which therefore got passed over in the original film, but with access to those who were inside the inferno and survived, the various factors leading up to the deadly combustion are explained in some considerable detail.

This access makes The Remnants much more people-centred than its predecessor. It becomes clear that there were two camps among the protesters, those from the building itself and those activists who came in from outside to help them in their struggle. In prison, the two factions became polarised. After their release, three survivors wanted to meet together on a regular basis to talk through and collectively process the trauma they’d experienced. By way of contrast, the fourth survivor’s way of dealing with it was to go to rallies and remind people of the tragedy to keep it in the public eye. The first three want him to meet up with him and talk about it, but for a long time he refuses, believing this to be a waste of time. Eventually though, the four are brought together in an event attempt to try and understand what happened on the day of the fire: this also serves as a catalyst for the unwilling party to engage (argue with) the others which proves cathartic for all concerned.

Any documentary about survivors of a tragic fire will bring to mind Grenfell Tower for UK residents, although the specifics of that tragedy are very different. Inevitably, because The Remnants concerns the Yongsan tragedy survivors rather than the authorities, the film feels more inwards-focused than its predecessor. But it’s a striking work for all that.

The Remnants plays in The London Korean Film Festival.