Tag: South Korea

Call Of God (Kõne Taevast)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The following quote from the late director Kim Ki-duk comes right at the start of this film, the last one he shot prior to his death from complications arising from COVID-19.

“The closer they are to death, the more humans miss and reminisce about their youth. I miss my twenties, although I made many mistakes in my youth. So, if I go back to that time, I really want to do good. But life never comes back.”

Kim wasn’t alive to complete it, so what we have here is the film put together from colleagues who worked with him. We’ll never know exactly how close the film is to what he intended, but it will have to do.

It was shot outside his native Korea – not the first time director Kim has done this: his second movie Wild Animals (1997) was shot in France, Amen (2011) in various parts of Europe and Stop (2015) in Japan. In recent years, various #metoo allegations against him by actresses have turned him into something of a persona non grata at home, and he’s been forced to work elsewhere. This final film was made in two Baltic States – Estonia and Lithuania – as well as Kyrgyzstan, with dialogue in Russian and Kyrgyz. The two lead actors could pass for Korean.

It takes place in the dreams of its young woman protagonist (Zhanel Sergazina), an idealistic romantic in search of / waiting for love to strike, when one day, a smart young man (Abylai Maratov) asks her the way to the Dream Café. It’s a sunny day and they walk in the park. Suddenly a thief snatches her purse, and the man sets off in pursuit, getting punched in the face but getting her bag back. After this, they start seeing one another. He turns out to be an author, so she buys his book. The next time they meet, it turns out he was going to give her a copy.

She initially resists his physical advances, but that doesn’t last long, and images soon get pretty racy. She starts talking about trust and accesses his mobile phone, whereupon she discovers that he’s still communicating with an old girlfriend and makes him swear he will speak to no other women from now on.

The black and white photography (i.e. most of the film) ostensibly represents a dream state, but that’s somewhat complicated by a parallel framing narrative in which, also in black and white, the woman periodically wakes from her dream and gets messages on her mobile phone (presumably the eponymous call of God) informing her that what occurred in her dream will soon recur in her waking life and advising that if she wants to see what happens next, she needs to go back to sleep. While you’re pondering what it all means, at the end of the film, it starts all over again, but this time in colour as what happened in her dream recurs in her waking life.

It’s bizarre that the film should play like a dream state when Kim himself would shortly pass into the next life – while you’re watching it there’s a definite sense of the hallucinatory, walking through parks, or later walking through nature, and the naive. In other parts, it throws the extraordinary at you, such as the scene where the couple feed each other tidbits on the end of sharp, pointed kitchen knife blades. And as elsewhere in the director’s films, there are characters who from time to time step outside the realm of the politically correct.

There’s something compelling about all this, to do with the very nature of cinema: sitting with a bunch of strangers in a darkened space for a group act of collective dreaming. For a while, Kim was the bad boy of Korean cinema, if not world cinema, going beyond the pale and doing things considered unacceptable. This film represents an intriguing coda to a fascinating if uneven career which refused to play by the rules.

Call Of God shows in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, as part of the Critics’ Picks strand.

Decision To Leave (Heojil Kyolshim)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

South Korea. City-based detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il from The Fortress, Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2017; The Host, 2006, Memories Of Murder, 2003, both Bong Joon ho) is married to a science nerd (Jung Yi-seo) who works at a nuclear plant in the seaside town of Ipo. Whatever sexual or romantic energy once existed between them has long since evaporated. She tolerates sex with him once a week on the grounds that research has shown it’s good for you and keeps you sharp, but she doesn’t appear to enjoy it much, going through the motions of a necessary chore. There doesn’t seem to be much more to this marriage for either of them than keeping up appearances. She lives and works in Ipo while he spends most of his working time away in the city, often going on nighttime stakeouts to observe suspects and forget about his habitual insomnia.

Which means that when Hae-joon finds himself investigating a case in which skilled amateur climber Ki Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok from The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, Lee Won-Tae, 2019; also The Host, Memories Of Murder) has fallen from a great height and the dead man’s Chinese-born wife Seo-rye (Tang Wei from Lust, Caution, Ang Lee, 2007) is a murder suspect, the detective is much more interested in her as a romantic subject than as a possible perpetrator, and this sensibility clouds his judgement. Eventually the case is closed, and she gets off scot-free, but the more time Hae-joon spends with her after this, and the more we see of her, the more likely it seems that she was the murderer.

The above constitutes what one might call the film’s first act. This first act and the subsequent second act, in which certain plot elements recur, recalls Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In the second act, Hae-joon has moved to the seaside town presumably so that he can spend more time with his wife. One day the couple are wandering though the fish market where they run into Seo-rye, who by coincidence has likewise moved into the area, with her new and shady financial consultant husband in tow. The latter seems more keen than he should be to talk to Hae-joon’s wife and leaves her his card.

It turns out this second husband has a history as a scam merchant and has made a lot of enemies along the way. Before we get to know him much more, however, he turns up dead in his swimming pool. His wife could be responsible, but there is another suspect too, a victim of his sharp business practices, who looks more likely.

Rather than allowing all this to unfold in straightforward linear narrative fashion, director Park works in terms of layers and constantly jumps back and forth throughout. This is at once enthralling and infuriating to watch; enthralling because of the myriad of painstakingly worked out details piled on top of one another, infuriating because there is so much going on at any one time that it’s easy to lose track.

Things might make more sense on a second viewing, but equally they might simply prove as confusing as they did first time round. Without a second watch, it’s impossible to say. Nevertheless, it’s a very rich film, thoroughly engrossing; one to which, having seen it once, you’ll want to return.

Decision To Leave is out in cinemas from Friday, 21st October. On Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Curzon Home Cinema in March.

Extreme Job (Geukhanjikeob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Radio voices. “Target in position.” “Unit 2 on roof.” Four criminals in a dimly lit apartment playing Mahjong. A knock at the window. A raid. But embarrassed lady cop Jang (f) (Lee Hanee) and her male boss Captain Ko (Ryu Seung-yong) can’t operate their window cleaning slings. The cliched, action packed raid by SWAT in which the criminals are swiftly arrested is visualised by the villain, but the actual police operation is a series of hilarious bungles, the criminals only “caught” when one of them is hit by a coach and the others are stopped by the resulting multiple car crash pile up. In a brutal debriefing with their chief, Captain Ko loses his position to young rising star Captain Choi, who’s just successfully caught a major criminal gang.

In order to save their reputation, Ko’s unit set up surveillance on the gang’s apartment where Hong and his men are awaiting the return of big boss Mubae (Shin Ha-kyun). There being a Chicken restaurant opposite, the cops take it over as a cover to watch the criminals’ premises. It turns out that one of their number Ma (Jin Sun-kyu) has an incredible family recipe for Suwon Rib Marinate Chicken which is an immediate success and overnight turns their fast food joint cover into a hugely profitable business. The team discover the joys of running a food emporium except for Young-ho (Lee Dong-hwai) who finds the others are becoming to busy too fulfil their police duties and back him up when needed.

Other memorable characters include merciless, ruthless and highly effective, female fighter Sun-hee (Jang Jin-hee) who uses a knife to put Hong on crutches on a whim from Mubae and rival gang leader Ted Chang (Oh Jung-se) who threaten to atart a turf war with Mubae.

Starting off as a lightweight caper, this is one of those movies that effortlessly shifts genre throughout, from caper to violent actioner to comedy to food porn and back again innumerable times. It’s aided no end by a clever soundtrack by a composer who understands the effect different pieces of music have on the audience, from the opening pizzicato caper strings to the closing titles which sounds like a spaghetti Western. Somewhere in the middle, a wounded character who may die is briefly underscored by the cantopop song from Asian mega-hit gangster outing A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, producer Tsui Hark, 1986).

As if this wasn’t already a huge crowd-pleaser, for the climactic fight sequence it reveals that Ko’s five man team are, for example, a Chinese national Judo champion (Ma), an Asian Muay Thai champion named Jang Bak after Ong Bak (Jang) while he himself has the nickname ‘Zombie’ because he’s sustained 12 stab wounds and just doesn’t die. These and other attributes are pressed into service with Ko taking bullet after bullet in pursuit of Mubae. This South Korean gem is proof positive, if it were needed, that even for the kind of entertaining movies on which it prides itself, Hollywood really isn’t the only game in town.

Extreme Job plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Thursday, November 6th, 20.35, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 15.30, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham – book here.

Watch the film trailer below:

The Pollen Of Flowers (Hwaboon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A film which owes a clear debt to Theorem (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968), director Ha Gil-Jong’s debut The Pollen Of Flowers has a lot of other things going on too. It’s believed to be the first Korean film to depict a gay character (actually a bisexual and the film features two) and watching it today as a Westerner, it also brought to mind films as different to Theorem (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968) as The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) and The Masque Of The Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964). In terms of Korean cinema, the films of Kim Ki-young are an obvious influence. There’s also an element of political allegory in there. All in all, quite a potent, mixed cocktail of tricks and influences.

Businessman Hyeon-ma (Nam Goong-won) lives at the Blue House with his mistress Se-ran (Yun So-ra) and her prepubescent sister Mi-ran (Choi Ji-hee). The Blue House is also the name of the home of known Korean heads of state, which adds a whole other layer of meaning to everything going on here. (Historically, South Korea was run by dictator Park Chung-hee between his ascension via military coup in 1961 through to his assassination in 1979. The Pollen Of Flowers was made bang in the middle of that period.)

What sets the ball rolling is on the one hand that Hyeon-ma brings home his gay lover Dan-Ju (the director’s brother Ha Myung-joong) and on the other Mi-ran has her first period (some four years before Hollywood would broach the subject of menstruation in Carrie, Brian De Palma, 1976). Much like the protagonist of Theorem, the quietly spoken Dan-Ju proceeds to sleep his way around the other two members of the household. The unexpected ending, like the last line of a Biblical parable, has a mob of creditors turn up to between them seize all the household’s goods in order to pay for losses incurred by Hyeon-ma’s company. This chaotic ending for me echoed the orgy followed by the plague in The Masque Of The Red Death.

Weaving around all this plot is the maid Ok-Neyo (Yeo Woon-kai), spoken to severely to keep her in her place, who is given to such actions as putting live rats into a room through its window while the two people inside are having sex. She immediately brings to mind the social climber trying to steal the husband of the family for who she works in The Housemaid/Hanryo (Kim Ki-young, 1963). She also increases the tension when the household is already on edge by playing a classical drum instrument. This comes after Dan-ju has sat in the garden repeatedly and noisily bashing a small rock against hard ground. As well as this sound, there’s an unexplained, repeated banging that goes on which for me recalled the paranormal knocking noises in The Haunting. But since The Pollen Of Flowers, whatever it may be, isn’t a ghost story or a horror story, one wonders what this noise is supposed to be – forces about to erupt and overwhelm the status quo of the Blue House, perhaps? In places, there’s also an extraordinary psych-prog-jazz score.

The LKFF is playing two more Ha Gil-Jong films in conjunction with the Barbican’s occasional Hidden Figures strand: The March Of Fools (1975) and his personal favourite The Ascension Of Han-ne (1977). (Not to mention a couple of Kim Ki-young films at the ICA.) Having now seen The Pollen Of Flowers, I honestly can’t wait. Movies really don’t come any more dirtylicious than this.

The March Of Fools (1975) Director: Ha Gil-Jong Wed 6 Nov 20.30, Barbican Cinema 2, book here.

The Ascension Of Han-ne (1977) Director: Ha Gil-Jong, Sunday 10 Nov, 18.00, Barbican Cinema 2, book here.
Goreojang (1963) Director: Kim Ki-young, 5 November⋅18:15 ICA, book here.
Ieoh Island (1987) Director: Kim Ki-young, Tuesday, 12 November⋅18:15 ICA, book here.

The Pollen of Flowers plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the festival trailer below:

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.

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:

Exit

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Yong-nam (Jo Jung-suk) can’t seem to find gainful employment. A text message tells him another job application has been turned down. He spends his days at the local playground, working out on the climbing frame watched from a bench by old ladies. Passing by with schoolmates, his prepubescent nephew Ji-Ho (Kim Kang-hoon) does his best to shrug off the embarrassment he feels if he goes anywhere near his uncle. But Yong-nam scarcely notices: he’d much rather wallow in self-pity about Eui-ju (Im Yoon-ah), the girl he fancied from the rock climbing club who was not only a better climber but also dumped him. His grown up sister Jung-Hyun (Kim Ji-yeong) constantly berates him both for his failure and for his keeping lots of climbing gear in his bedroom cupboard.

So when his family gathers to celebrate his granny’s 70th birthday, Yong-nam suggests the skyscraper hotel where Eui-ju is rumoured to work. Sure enough, while he’s doing his best to sit at his table and not get roped into singing with everybody else, she appears. As he tries to impress her, inventing stories about how well his corporate career is going, you can feel the impending romantic disaster. She, meanwhile, may look successful in her job as hotel vice-manager, but her slimy manager in who she has no personal interest is constantly trying to date her and can barely do his job (holding the position simply because his dad owns the hotel).

Then the film switches gear as a disillusioned industrialist releases a deadly gas from a lorry in the centre of Seoul, not far from the hotel, which burns up the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to come in contact with it. Cue drivers clutching at their necks and fatally crashing cars and pedestrians fleeing before the advancing wall of toxic gas. Cue also Jung-Hyun with Ji-Ho in tow, having briefly nipped out of the hotel, suddenly facing the approaching gas. While the child gets himself safely back to the lobby, the mother is overcome and suffers facial burns and unconsciousness before the quick-thinking Yong-nam rushes down from the floor where their party is taking place and carries her back to the sealed safety of the building.

With the gas cloud both spreading and slowly rising, the guests go up to the top floor to access the roof in the hope of being rescued by helicopter, but the door is locked and the incompetent manager has lost the key. Back on the party floor, Yong-nam improvises with rope, breaks a full storey glass window and goes climbing up the side of the building to access the roof, forced to unhook his safety line en route because his rope isn’t long enough.

When a ‘copter eventually reaches them with a rescue cage, there is room for everyone but himself and Eui-ju, who as manager commendably wants everyone else airlifted first. Remaining behind, the pair must negotiate a harrowing series of building to building jumps, Parkour and side of building climbs as they ascend higher and higher on the Seoul skyline in the hope that a ‘copter will reach them before the rising gas does.

It’s no surprise that this obvious audience pleaser has been a huge box office success in its native South Korea, juggling as it does deftly observed family comedy with nicely underplayed romantic subplot and genuinely gripping climbing, jumping, running and other action scenes. If the chemistry between the two leads accounts for some of this success, that wouldn’t matter without all the thought that director Lee has clearly put into his script to make an essentially simple idea work very well indeed. The feeling for family culture which grounds the film for its first reel pays dividends in terms of audience sympathy for the lead character and the film throws in not only some clever ideas involving drones but even at one point the extraordinary visual distraction of a giant model of a spider crab half way up a building over which our leading man and lady must climb.

The film highlighted the problem of locked roof access in buildings and the ensuing controversy has thrown up a government reaction that will hopefully in due course result in changes to South Korean law. On a wider note, it says much about a society which values people in terms of their job while marginalising any other talents or interests they may possess. When the chips are down, the hero who saves the day here is a social outcast whose frowned upon hobby is exactly what’s needed to survive the unexpectedly perilous situation in which he finds himself.

This is light, frothy entertainment and a thoroughly engrossing experience, well worth seeking out if you get the chance. LEAFF are to be congratulated for choosing it as their opening film.

Exit plays in LEAFF, The London East Asia Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

The House Of Us (Woori-Jip)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Eleven-year-old Lee Hana (Kim Na-yeon) watches her mum and dad argue. The family should be having breakfast, but instead mum finds ways to berate dad every time he opens his mouth. She has a brother, but doesn’t get on with him especially well. When she gets to school, Hana is as surprised as anyone else that she’s won the Good Classmate Award. Her dad is really pleased. But what she really wants is for her parents to get their relationship back on track. To this end, throughout the narrative, she keeps proposing a family trip to the seaside. But her mum is way too busy with her demanding job to spare a weekend any time soon.

One day in the supermarket, Hana observes nine-year-old Yoo-mi (Kim Shi-a) and her seven-year-old younger sister Yoo-jin (Joo Ye-rim). They seem to be happy as sisters: perhaps their family life is better than hers. A short time after, she runs into Yoo-jin again when the younger girl has lost her sister. Hana takes the girl in hand and searches with her until they find her older sister. The three become friends.

Later at home, when her dad’s phone rings, Hana discovers he has a girlfriend and reacts by hiding his phone in a shoebox, which she later takes to the other two girls home to give them things to play with. The phone gets forgotten. The three later prank phone “devil Joo” from a payphone and call her a tramp.

Meanwhile, the two girls’ mum’s landlady, who can never find their absent mum to speak to her, is trying to put the flat back on the market, which would mean the girls having to move out. Hana and the two girls play up when she brings prospective tenants to see the flat, making up stories about how terrible the flat is to live in because of all its problems (which they’ve invented).

Having helped them build a model of their ideal house out of household odds and ends, Hana organises herself and the two girls a trip to Bora beach to find their mother, but the three get a bus which doesn’t go where they expect and eventually end up at the wrong beach, taking up in the abandoned tent of a family from which the man has just rushed his pregnant wife to hospital. Both families, that of Hana and that of the two sisters, clearly have a lot of issues to work though.

With compelling performances by its three young leads, this South Korean movie completely takes you into the mindset of an eleven-year-old girl as she grapples with complex, adult issues – the breakdown of personal relationships, landlord and tenant problems. It holds the attention for an adult audience, and is likely to do the same for children of eleven or above (or at least for girls of that age). Not so much a children’s movie as a movie about children, it has plenty of rough edges for the parts of childhood where things aren’t as rosy as they might be. All of which makes it worth seeing.

The House Of Us plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film 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:

Default (Gukgabudo-ui Nal)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The year is 1996. The news media are championing South Korea’s economy as it seemingly goes from strength to strength, never questioning whether financial institutions might in fact be pursuing practices which are sooner or later going to have disastrous economic results. Ms. Han Si-hyun (Kim Hye-su) who runs a fiscal policy unit at the Bank of Korea submits a devastating report to the Bank’s governor, explaining that she and her small department have procedures set in place to save the economy and protect ordinary Koreans from disaster.

The politicians have a very different agenda, however, specifically the smarmy Vice-Minister of Finance (Jo Woo-jin) who views financial collapse as a way to weaken the rights of the working class and restructure the economy in favour of large business interests. Although it’s not name checked, there are echoes here of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine and the film based upon it. Against Han’s advice, the government secretly holds talks with the IMF in the form of Michel Camdessus (a suitably creepy Vincent Cassel).

While most of the government officials and the bank’s governor are male, Ms.Han’s small team comprises both genders in equal measure. At one point, she’s subjected to verbal abuse as to how women are emotional and shouldn’t be allowed to work in banks. At another, she bravely holds an unauthorised press conference to reveal to the press what’s going on, only for none of the papers to cover the story.

In a second plot strand, young, smart and hungry stockbroker Yoon Jung-hak (Yoo Ah-in) quits his established financial firm who are convinced the country is on a sure financial footing because, like Han, he can see the impending crash ahead. Unlike Han, however, he wants to play the market and help investors profit from it. The film doesn’t quite know how to handle Yoon. He’s shown as both the visionary who accurately predicts what’s coming and the ruthless predator who helps his clients profit from it – yet on one occasion he rails against his investor clients, suggesting that making money isn’t everything.

A third plot strand takes the proceedings closer to ordinary people as small business owner Gap-su (Heo Jun-ho) is paid for a lucrative deal with a promissory note rather than cash which later turns into a worthless piece of paper when he has creditors to pay. He reassures his workers that they will get the wages they were due two days ago while his wife who works elsewhere loses her job. He contemplates jumping off the balcony of the high rise apartment in which his family live as his two children sleep soundly in their room.

The relentless pace never allows itself to get bogged down in the radical ideas at the film’s heart, preferring instead to keep things moving. An audience-pleasing melodrama as exciting as any Western blockbuster, it successfully conveys a pivotal moment in recent Asian economic history.

Default played as a teaser for LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

The Return

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The plight of Koreans adopted by foreigners who take them far away from the land of their birth is the subject of this Danish-Korean co-production, the first feature by Malene Choi. It’s basically in English, with parts in Danish (with English subtitles) and parts in Korean (with no subtitles, that language not being spoken by the film’s Korean-born, Danish-bred characters).

It all starts with strange, disconcerting electronic sounds and equally unsettling images such as a person disappearing through a door which closes behind them, the shot trimmed in such a way as to leave almost none of the frames of the disappearing person in the shot. Or a woman, who we’ll later discover to be Karoline (Karoline Sofie Lee), viewed from behind as she trudges through lower leg deep mud on a beach (an image which, by accident or design, reminded me of the similarly apocalyptic image towards the start of fellow Dane Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, 2011).

Karoline has left the Denmark she knows from her upbringing to travel to South Korea where she was born to try and find her birth parents. She checks in to a hostel which functions as a temporary base for birth Koreans adopted in other countries trying to track down their parents. She bonds with Thomas (Thomas Hwan) who, like her, was adopted by Danish parents.

Thomas, who is not new to this process as Karoline is, advises her after a frustrating visit to a Holt International Children’s Services (HICS) office where a lady who works there gives Karoline the runaround. It’s not clear whether the lady hasn’t checked hospital records because, as she claims, such records are rarely kept, or because she can’t be bothered, or because it’s somehow against some unwritten law of Korean culture to ask for such things.

Whatever, our female protagonist finds the whole experience frustrating, even harrowing. Thomas advises her that people who threaten such functionaries with their refusal to leave often get told the information they seek. Interestingly, the charity employee is a real life one, the scene staged presumably with her not being told the two actors were actors so that she would treat them like real life adoptees.

This brings us to a fascinating aspect of the film. Its director and many of its actors, including the two leads, are Korean adoptees to other countries (Denmark in the case of the director and her two leads). The script was based on Choi’s own experiences searching for her Korean birth parents. She then encouraged her cast to improvise, drawing on their own experiences of their searches for their families. Serial vox pops with one young woman feel like she’s recounting her own personal experiences. You feel like you’re watching documentary and fiction rolled into one – a most unsettling experience…and yet it works.

Thomas has considerably more luck with his own search and takes Karoline along to meet his mother. In a remarkable single shot scene, son and mother communicate on a very deep level eating a meal she has prepared, despite not sharing the same verbal language and without anything so clichéd as a hug. The effectiveness of this scene is is down in no small part to the extraordinary performance of the actress playing his mother.

Altogether, this is a remarkable, heartbreaking film likely to resonate with anyone adopted into a foreign culture trying to trace their birth family, or even people adopted without the trauma of being sent abroad.

The Return plays in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Watch the film trailer below: