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London Korean Film Festival 2016: The quality is always high and the quantity seems to expand each year, as Helen M Jerome finds at the 2016 London Korean Film Festival. These days the best-curated festivals seem to take the temperature of not only their own culture, but also the world – the personal becoming the universal. Tackling eternal themes and shockingly contemporary trends through anything from costume drama to shoot-em-ups, Korean films continually rise to the challenge, and their ambitions and budgets seem to be growing at a similar rate.
We won’t linger long on the closing film, Yourself and Yours, from Hong Sang-Soo, which gives you exactly what you’d expect from Hong, the much-copied and highly influential master of clever repetition. Let’s instead focus on the opening film, Lee Kyoung-mi‘s The Truth Beneath, which sets the tone for a whole swathe of films by Korean women gathered at the festival. Co-written with long-time collaborator Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Handmaiden), Lee’s film seems to be centred around a looming election in which one candidate’s slogan is ‘Your Children Are Safe‘… and then his own daughter, Min-jin, goes missing. The bereft couple are encouraged to keep it quiet – for the campaign’s sake.
They try to get help from a private detective, and the mother (Son Ye-jin, brilliant) pursues her own leads, hacking into her daughter’s laptop for clues, then getting her daughter’s only friend hypnotised to see if she can recall Min-jin’s abduction. Paranoia leads the mother further into corruption, and meanwhile the father is being wiretapped by his political rivals. And as the mother discovers things she’d rather not know, the story becomes yet more tangled, bloody and sleazy. Weirdly – or perhaps not, when you consider the co-writers’ pedigree – in the midst of the fast-paced thriller, there’s loads of wacky humour.
Eight years earlier, Lee Kyoung-mi made Crush And Blush (right, co-written with Park Chan-wook, who also ‘features’ in a not-quite-cameo on a character’s nametag). With themes of love and jealousy, plus wonderfully quirky characters, you can see how this feeds into Lee’s current work. In an excellent Q&A session afterward the screening, the director says that when she was working on Park’s famous film, Lady Vengeance, one of his assistants had a face that often reddened, and she picked up on this to use it in her own film: “I thought it was quite cute!” Noticeably all the female characters are fully fleshed-out people, whereas the men are almost all decorative, in a rare bit of role reversal. Lee adds: “I think I have a bit of me which is sadistic; I want people to remember the film for a long time.” And Lee also reckons that the immature, unstable character in the film is actually her!
Named Crushing It, in tribute to Lee Kyoung-mi’s debut, a welcome and very lively forum discussing female filmmaking featured Lee herself, veteran film-maker Yim Soon-rye plus Jane Gull, British director of indie feature My Feral Heart. Questions came fast and furious, and the three women directors held nothing back. Asked if there are any advantages in being a woman in the film industry, Yim says “Not a single one! And it’s now even harder.” Lee says the film industry is made of men who have developed the environment, “so it’s difficult for female director, and the method I choose is to find male colleagues who can help. And I am determined to survive.” Gull says the UK needs more entry-level female filmmakers and new female voices – though as the producer, she did at least get to hand-pick her crew. Yim says that the problem dates back to the 1990s, when all the technicians were male and they tended to push down female directors. She was bullied on set, then they all had a heavy drinking session. which she won!
Lee says that the memories were all starting to come back and she’d like to seek revenge on these people. [sounds like one of her films with Park?] Their advice to women in the industry is to channel their creative instinct and you’ll get more opportunities. Yim says that [counterintuitively] female audiences often prefer rough, macho, unrealistic films, because they go with their boyfriends. Lee says it’s harder to create roles with catharsis because of female physical strength – and funding is hard if one of the lead characters is a child, “and I still don’t understand this.” Bloody minded determination drives her on though. “Crush and Blush didn’t succeed and I wanted to make another film that did. So I said I’d carry on until I had a success!” Which The Truth Beneath certainly is.
The documentary to watch if you want to know more about Women in Korean Filmmaking is Yim Soon-rye’s 2001 film, Keeping The Vision Alive. Through lots of candid interviews with female directors, editors etc and a generous selection of clips, Yim shows how hard it is to join the boys’ club with its obstacles and drinking culture. as she discovered first hand.
Three more female-facing films from the last couple of years – all with women at the helm – give a glimmer of hope and show how much talent is coming through in Korea now. Boo Ji-young‘s Cart is based on real events, namely a lengthy 2007 supermarket workers’ strike. Similar to our own Made in Dagenham in tone, though not necessarily in outcome, this is very much an all-for-one, one-for-all type dispute, complete with occupation of the premises. The company try everything to break the strikers’ resolve, from pleading, threatening, dividing and bribing to using weaponised police and water cannons. and Boo makes the drama resonate by fully fleshing out the main strikers’ characters, motivations and home lives.
Also starting in a supermarket, where an idiosyncratic worker, Park Seoyoung, is being summarily (and perhaps justifiably) sacked, Blue Mouthed Face is Kim Soo-jung‘s involving portrait of Seoyoung’s life. There’s little through plot, however, just scenes building up our impression of her world and family. We see the dodgy young monk with whom she sings karaoke and has liaisons, and her smart, but physically disabled brother who lives at home, plus their ailing mum in hospital. Seoyoung is fighting off a loan company, and co-workers who at first bully her, then want to unionise (obviously a current concern in Korea). It’s never going to end well, but we go on an involving and ultimately shocking journey to get there.
Go to page 2 for more great films from the London Korean Film Festival 2016.