Actors Gong Seung-yeon and Lee Hee-jun brought the house down at the opening ceremony of this year’s 25th Jeonju International Film Festival, held in the South Korean city from May 1 to 10.
After delivering a politely positive, tightly scripted to-and-fro about cinema, the Korean stars went off-script to namecheck the summer blockbuster they will be starring in. The audience’s enthusiasm set the scene for Jeonju’s 25th anniversary edition.
The festival has gone far from its humble beginnings in 1999, when it was founded as a more modest, experimental counterpart to the bigger, splashier Pusan (now Busan) International Film Festival. Once a showcase dedicated mostly to independently produced, digitally shot productions from South Korea and across Asia, the festival has evolved into some kind of a big-tent event for an unmistakably young audience. Among the festival’s most popular offerings this year was a selfie-friendly thematic area celebrating Pixar’s Inside Out 2.
But Jeonju remains unwavering in its support for artistic voices from the margins. Jeonju Cinema Project, the festival’s annual flagship initiative in which three feature-length projects receive a production grant of up to US $100,000, is a case in point. And the yield this year was again very impressive.
Leading the charge was DIRECT ACTION, a four-hour documentary in which directors Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau zero in on an encampment in northwestern France, where a community of social activists live and work on tracts of land the authorities want to confiscate for a mega-airport project. With its mix of patiently observed long takes of artisanal labor, sweeping drone footage of the landscape around the area and harrowing footage of police brutality against protesters, the documentary is ethnography and a political manifesto rolled into one.
Given Russell’s standing on the festival circuit, DIRECT ACTION – which bowed amidst critical acclaim in Berlin in February before returning to Jeonju for its Asian premiere – would most probably have been made even if Jeonju hasn’t set the ball rolling. The same could be said, perhaps to a lesser extent, of José Luis Torres Leiva’s When the Clouds Hide the Shadows, a subtle, beautiful and emotionally gripping account of the way an Argentinean actor (María Alche) come to terms with a bereavement in a small town on the southern tip of Chile.
The first fictional feature of activist-turned-filmmaker Kangyu Garam and the sole Korean entry of the Jeonju Cinema Project this year, Lucky, Apartment begins in thriller territory, with a woman going to extremes to rid her flat of the stench of a dead woman’s body in an apartment downstairs. But gradually it transforms into a social-realist drama about a young lesbian couple’s unravelling relationship as they try to confront their prying neighbors and prejudiced relatives – and their reconciliation as they unearth the story behind the corpse that nearly tore them apart.
Lucky, Apartment is just one of the many exceptional first- and second-features from Korean bowing at Jeonju this year. The biggest hit of the festival’s top-tier Korean competition was definitely Time To Be Strong, in which three forcibly retired K-pop stars contend with the implosion of their careers and the rest of their still-young lives in a small seaside town. Director Namkoong Sun ignores melodramatic tropes (the film is delightfully devoid of cheesy romance) and convenient flashbacks (the audience has to imagine what the protagonists’ showbiz highs and low were like), instead opting to gradually reveal her characters’ painful pasts through chance encounters with unfazed yet sympathetic locals.
Having won the Best Film and Best Actor award at the festival, Time To Be Strong occupies the middle-ground among the titles in the Korean competition. On the radical end of the spectrum stands Blanket Wearer, in which first-time filmmaker Park Jeong-mi attaches a small mobile camera on herself and records her experiment of turning her back on money and living solely on gleaned goods and borrowed homes. Boasting the same energy as some of the DV-made films which propelled Jeonju IFF to prominence two decades ago, Blanket Wearer is at once chaotic, enlightening and immensely funny.
My Missing Aunt is another creature altogether. Chancing on traces of an aunt she has never heard of, director Yang Ju-yeon embarks on a heartrending mission to investigate her suicide in 1975 and her subsequent disappearance from family records. Gathering a wealth of testimonies (plus collages of photographs and documents) about her aunt’s achievements and anguish during her short life, the director delivers a homage to a young woman whose future was extinguished too soon, and a critique of the gender-based oppression she and her peers suffered, which the director herself has been subjected to as well.
On the other end of the stylistic continuum is Mother’s Kingdom, a psychological thriller revolving around the unnervingly interdependent relationship between Kyung-hee, a middle-aged hairdresser, and her self-help author son Wookie. As the woman succumbs to dementia and loses her grasp on reality, the young man slowly learns of the roots of his nightmares about the father he’s never known. Influenced clearly by Psycho (the grown-up mommy’s boy, the basement with a secret) and perhaps Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (in which an old woman goes to extremes to prevent her son from being arrested for murder), Mother’s Kingdom boasts a seamless screenplay, effective production design and strong performances from its two leads. Produced by the Korean Academy of Film Arts, Lee Sang-hak’s first feature is repped by well-known Korean sales outfit Finecut – a sign of how prepared it already is for market consumption.
While markedly different in style and tone from Mother’s Kingdom, Chung Hae-il’s Sister Yujeong is just as successful in sweeping viewers along with a story brimming with suspense and symbolism. Struggling with her work as a nurse in an understaffed hospital, the titular character receives the shocking news that her erstwhile diligent and well-behaved kid sister Ki-jeong has been arrested for conducting an abortion in school. With both teachers and detectives declining to investigate the unusual circumstances surrounding the “crime”, Yu-jeong wades in.
In contrast to most films about pregnancies among the underaged, Sister Yujeong doesn’t dwell on the origin story of the pregnancy itself. As Yujeong says: “Who cares about a boyfriend or a petition letter stating Ki-jeong’s morals? It’s why Ki-jeong did it that matters, isn’t it?” That’s exactly what the film attempts to do, as its female characters – teenagers, unwed women, pregnant patients – are weighed down by social expectations and rules about how they treat their own bodies.
