Category: Festivals

The Shadowless Tower (白塔之光, Zhang Lu, 2023)

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A tale of middle-aged loneliness and regret, Zhang Lu’s Shadowless Tower (白塔之光, Bái Tǎ zhī Guāng) takes its name from a white pagoda in the centre of Beijing that is said to cast no shadow. Or at least, as the hero later suggests, its shadow may be far away in its old home town of Tibet. Most Zhang’s protagonists are somewhat displaced most particularly spiritually and existentially, cut adrift by corrupted paternity while uncertain how to progress towards the future. 

For Gu (Xin Baiqing), a former poet now a melancholy restaurant critic and divorcee with a small daughter, the problem is he’s beginning to feel more and more like the father he hasn’t seen since he was five when his mother kicked him out of the house after he was accused of groping a woman on a bus. In a meta-textual touch, Gu’s kite-flying father Yunlai is played by film director Tian Zhuangzhuang who once made a film called The Blue Kite that is also about failed fatherhood and was banned by the authorities on its release. In any case, Gu is only a part-time father to his little girl, Smiley (Wang Yiwen), who is living with his sister and her husband who has been secretly in touch with Yunlai and aware that he rides hundreds of miles by bicycle twice a year visit Beijing on the kids’ birthdays though he cannot meet them.

In many ways, it might seem to be the father, or at least the image of one, that is the shadowless tower that hangs over Gu’s life. He fantasies about interrogating him over the bus incident, wondering if what his mother did was right or if they unfairly rejected a good man because of a misunderstanding. His mother’s anger was apparently partly because Yunlai would not compromise and confess to the crime to get a lighter sentence, instead being sent to a labour camp which left her financially responsible for the children on her own. Gu’s sister Wenhai (Li Qinqin) reflects that if he had not been such a good father to begin with she could have forgiven him, but because he was his disgrace caused her to lose faith in the world. 

Gu seems not to have much faith in the world either, remarking that he separated from his wife owing to an excess of politeness, the same politeness that keeps him aloof from his surroundings and prevents him from making meaningful connections. Yet for all that, he embodies a kind of fatherhood, sitting down on the bed of his lodger and gently placing a hand on his back on hearing his crying through the wall. The young man later embraces him as a son to a father, while Gu finds himself dancing a melancholy waltz with Yunlai who is also an image of his future self. 

But even as a lifelong Beijinger, Gu remains rootless. Meeting up with old friends, all of whom might have been young in the late ‘80s, they drink and sing the song composed for the 2008 Olympics as if they were looking for a father in the city. Gu also reads from Bei Dao’s My Beijing which similarly rests on a sense of exile even while present. The only woman in the group laments that she never married and meditates on the ghost of lost love, while the only one of them who fled abroad eventually takes his own life in a foreign land.

Jolting him out of his inertia, Gu encounters free spirited photographer Wenhai (Huang Ya) who shares his sister’s name though she is also similarly displaced and struggling with a more literal orphanhood that leaves her caught between the North East and the Cantonese-speaking south where she was adopted. A gentle love story arises between them, Wenhai cutting through the wall of Gu’s politeness with refreshing frankness but also with troubles of her own and a worrying tendency to refer to him as her father which nevertheless has a kind of circularity to it. 

Crouching down by the pagoda, they can’t see their shadows either and wonder where they are. Then again, perhaps it’s not so much that tower casts no shadow, but the shadow it casts is so vast that covers everything below just as Gu’s searching for his father overshadows his life even as he is also searching for himself. Intensely moving, Zhang’s poetic drama waxes on middle-aged rootlessness but also the interconnectedness of all things, from kites to earthworms and the great dance of life in all its inescapable loneliness. 

The Shadowless Tower screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

A Letter from Kyoto (교토에서 온 편지, Kim Min-ju, 2022)

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A disillusioned young woman returns to her hometown in search of healing but finds it in a state of disrepair in the fracturing relationship between her two sisters, one approaching middle age and the other yet to graduate high school, and her ageing mother entering the first stages of dementia in Kim Min-ju’s poignant debut feature A Letter From Kyoto (교토에서 온 편지, Gyoto-eseo on Pyeonji). As the title implies partly a story of dislocation, seeking both an escape from and return to the safety and comfort of a hometown, the film explores the destructive effects of secrecy and miscommunication between those who ought to share a greater intimacy.

Hye-young (Han Sun-hwa) couldn’t wait to get out of Yeongdo and has been living in Seoul for the past several years with the aspiration of becoming a writer but has been earning her living working for a TV station making educational programmes. It’s clear that something has gone wrong for her in her sudden and unannounced visit home, though she only explains that she’s taking break. Meanwhile, she begins to notice that her mother, Hwa-ja (Cha Mi-kyung), has become forgetful and easily confused. Not only is she overstocking her fridge with multiple purchases of persimmons but habitually picking up the leftover kimchi from the kitchen where she works despite reminders from her otherwise sympathetic boss not to. 

The ages of the three sisters, like those of the Chekhov play marooned in the provinces, seem to be representative of the passage of a life. The youngest, Hye-joo (Song Ji-hyun), is boisterous and full of dreams keeping her hopes of becoming a hip hop dancer a secret on remembering all the fuss surrounding Hye-young’s announcement that she wanted to become a writer. Oldest sister Hye-jin (Han Chae-ah) by contrast is cynical and worldweary. She supports the family with her job in a mid-range handbag shop where she once dated the manager only he decided to break up with her because she didn’t want to leave Busan and had no interest in money. 

Hye-jin later tells unexpected love interest Polish sailor Piotr that she has never been abroad perhaps because she’s in a sense afraid to leave while constrained by her sense of duty owing to being the older sister, mildly resentful of Hye-young for abandoning them and shifting all of the burden onto her. A sense of displacement floats around the family home in part because of Hwa-ja’s childhood past, born in Japan and then brought to Korea by her Korean father without her Japanese mother’s knowledge. The film’s title comes from a series of letters the daughters find that are written in Japanese, a language that Hwa-ja claims to have forgotten though is perhaps slowly returned to her as they begin to translate in an attempt to retrace and reclaim the past that been hidden from them.

Though she recounts a fear of discrimination because of her Japanese ancestry, Hwa-ja had never particularly hidden her past answering Hye-young’s questions as to why she never mentioned it with the reasonable reply that she never asked. A sense of secrecy and miscommunication continues to divide the sisters with Hye-young reluctant to discuss the reasons behind her desire to return home, Hye-joo keeping her dancing dreams a secret, and Hye-jin not saying much at all in her disappointment and resentment. It frustrated Hye-young that her mother never throws anything away, but to her it would be like throwing away a part of her past self and another act of forgetting aside from that she no longer has any control over.

Yet the film seems to suggest that Hwa-ja need not remember everything when her daughters can remember it for her, adopting her orphaned memories into their own stories while she too is able to make a kind of peace with the past on reclaiming the memories of her own mother that were otherwise lost to her through linguistic and geographical displacement. Exposing the secrets and repairing the fracturing past frees each of the sisters to follow a path that more suits them, accepting that there’s a time to leave your hometown, and a time to return, whether or not or one eventually decides to stay. Poignant and somewhat elegiac, the film eventually celebrates maternal and sisterly connections extending beyond the immediate family in the presence of Hwa-ja’s staunchly loyal childhood friend along with a sense of serenity in rootedness to a particular place that represents a home.

A Letter from Kyoto screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Tinker Ticker (들개, Kim Jung-hoon, 2013)

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A jaded young man finds himself torn between continuing to fight the system and a total capitulation to it in Kim Jung-hoon’s explosive debut feature Tinker Ticker (들개, Deul-gae). Fit to explode, Jung-gu (Byun Yo-han) takes his revenge on a bullying culture by literally blowing it to hell but after a spell in juvenile detention emerges meek and mild, lacking in resistance and apparently willing to undergo whatever degradations are asked of him in order to achieve conventional success. 

Having placed a bomb in the car of a teacher who was abusive towards him, Jung-gu was caught and sent to prison with the unfortunate consequence that he can no longer study chemistry as he’s been banned from using dangerous substances. He repeatedly attends job interviews where he is asked bizarre and invasive questions, but can only find work as a post-graduate teaching assistant to a marketing professor who, like his teacher, largely abuses his position to humiliate him. To ease his frustrations, Jung-gu makes bombs at home but offers to send them out on the internet for free on the condition that the recipient actually use them.

His life changes when he runs into rebellious drop out Hyo-min (Park Jung-min) who is done with capitulation and fully committed to bucking the system. Seemingly from a wealthy family, he’s cut ties with his parents and lives a squalid life in a bedsit while continuing to attend university lectures despite having been expelled. Jun-gu sends one of the bombs to him to see what would happen and though Hyo-min seemed like he was going to simply throw it away he ends up blowing up a van which ironically has the CJ Films logo on the side.

Hyo-min in a sense represents Jung-gu’s rage and resentment towards the system that oppresses him along with a desire for anarchic autonomy while he conversely leans closer to a conventional corporate existence by willingly debasing himself before his sleazy boss Professor Baek (Kim Hee-chang) who asks him to act unethically by “revising” the results of his research so they can secure funding and do a back door deal with his long-standing contact Mr. Kim. Baek also forces him to drink beer that’s been drained through his sock as part of a bizarre hazing ritual while otherwise running him down or insulting him at the office. 

Hyo-min tries to goad Jun-gu into blowing up his attempts at conventionality by taking out Baek, but he continues to vacillate apparently still interested in becoming a corporate drone whatever the personal cost. “I don’t want you to become dull,” a slightly spruced up Hyo-min later insists in trying to push Jung-gu into killing Baek, while Jung-gu isn’t sure which life he wants torpedo. In any case, he seems incredibly ashamed of his criminal past and wary of others finding out about it not just because of its practical consequences for his employment but on a personal level. If he wants to transition fully to the life of a soulless salaryman he’ll need to kill the Hyo-min within him and remove all traces of resistance and individuality.

Despite having promised to do so, none of the other men who request the bombs actually use them perhaps like Jung-gu lacking the ability to follow through but enjoying the power of having the ability to burn the world even if they’ll never use it. Jung-gu’s bombing fixation is indeed in its way passive, a vicarious thrill in the ability to cause havoc for no real purpose but not really doing anything with it all while his resentment grows in parallel with his desire to be accepted by mainstream society. Hyo-min eventually comes to the conclusion that nothing really changes, and it both and doesn’t for Jung-gu who finds himself succumbing to the consumerist desires of a capitalistic society willing to debase himself, and later humiliate others, to claim his rightful place on the corporate ladder. Kim takes aim at the pressure cooker society, implying that these young men are in themselves almost ready to explode in their twin resentments and jealousies while ultimately complicit in their own oppression in wilfully stepping in to a corporate straitjacket even at the cost of their freedom and individuality. 

Tinker Ticker screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Into the Shaolin (在少林, Sun Hongyun, 2023)

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Like many of the monks at the centre of Sun Hongyun’s documentary Into the Shaolin (在少林
zài Shàolín), our associations with the name are almost exclusively tied up with martial arts movies. Yet as they discovered on entering the temple, it’s not all about kung fu which to some at least came as a disappointment when they were still novices tasked with performing ordinary chores. Then again, many of them do not necessarily anticipate being monks all their lives and so long spent in contemplation leaves them with few other ways to support themselves in the secular world other than through leveraging their martial arts training.

As we can see, many monks come to the temple in childhood often to escape poverty or because they were thought to be troublemakers at home. Sun follows the little monks with empathy, capturing both their mastery over the craft at such a young age and the pain and difficulty it often causes them raising series ethical issues over whether it is right and fair to expect so much from small children who often cry in pain or frustration. Others also remark that they miss their parents having essentially been sent away though one boy explains that his mother managed to get a job nearby so that she can still spend time with him and observe his training.

It’s these familial ties that present the strongest contradictions to the monks and bind them more fully to the secular world. One young man who came to the temple for lack of other options contemplates remaining there for the rest of his life and is a little resentful that even at 18 he still has to get the permission of the grandparents who raised him to go on a mountain retreat. The grandparents, who lost their son, his father, in a workplace accident they believe caused by overwork, want nothing more than for him to get married and start a business and so they flatly refuse to allow him to go on being a monk forever instructing him not to bother contacting them again if that’s what he plans to do. 

But then as others have said, being a shaolin monk doesn’t teach you how to live in the secular world and gives you few transferable skills that would allow you to support yourself. An older monk explains that most of the monks who came to the temple at the same time as him have left but almost all still work with martial arts in some capacity as there’s nothing else for them to do. Even so, the little monks talk of doing other things with their lives once they grow up one hoping to become a soldier defending China and another a movie star. Many came to the temple specifically because of their love of kung fu films starring Jet Li, Donnie Yen, or Wang Baoqiang who himself trained in Shaolin martial arts. 

Others meanwhile have found serenity in the rhythms of the temple and may no longer be suited to living outside of it. The show the boys are preparing utilises a series of boxes of the kind they usually sleep in which as one monk admits to the untrained eye closely resemble coffins but as he puts it no one really needs much more space than their body naturally occupies and it doesn’t really matter where they sleep. Of course, to those in the secular world those things mean a great deal and there’s probably a big difference between a box at the temple and one on the street. Another monk reflects on the shaolin name which means “few trees” though at the temple few is a lot and less is more. He thinks that it’s a fallacy to consider a “return” to the secular world because the true “return” is to your true self which you only discover by leaving home. 

That might be a sentiment shared by a Serbian doctoral student staying at the temple while researching her thesis and in particular the concept of “Chan”. Offering her own insights as a foreigner living at the temple she reflects on the differing attitudes to nature found in China while she seems to be the only woman currently in training. She remarks that it might be odd to call a temple home but that’s what it’s been to here even as she prepares to leave it. Sun’s documentary has an ambivalence to it, at once admiring of the monks in their asceticism, but also somewhat sad not only for their inability to escape their suffering, merely exchange one kind for another, but also for the predicament they my find themselves in should the time come to leave the temple whether by their own will or otherwise.

Into the Shaolin screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC and is available to stream in the US until Nov. 26.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly (Li Shasha, 2023)

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In her personal essay film Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly, Li Shasha finds herself meditating on her rootless life and traditional attitudes to the natural world when confronted firstly by ecological disaster and then by global pandemic. In the traditional culture of the Nakhi People among whom Li grew up in the remote landscape of the Himalayas, they say there was once a war between humanity and the spirits because humanity took too much from the Earth and gave nothing in return. As wildfires rip through Oregon where she handled settled and begun a garden, she wonders if we haven’t reneged on our bargain and are paying for our lack of regard for nature.

On a return to the US, it suddenly seems odd to her that grasshoppers and frogs appear only as motifs on shop window displays amid the grey concrete of the cities. As child, she had taken part in rituals honouring fire but now sees its terrifying potential as the world around her is reduced to ashes. In the wake of disaster, she pays a visit home to see the grandmother who raised her while her her own mother studied abroad but encounters a different kind of destruction as the village she once new has become a living museum. Now designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site, most of the original residents have moved away and rent their traditional-style homes out to the throngs of tourists which now descend on the region. Wandering around the town she sees a bustling night life scene in which the traditional dance of Nakhi People has been repurposed as entertainment for outsiders drinking in the many bars.

In order to rediscover Nakhi culture she must head further into the mountains, but also observes that this way of life has also been disrupted by encroaching modernity. She finds a little girl who, as she once was, is being cared for by grandparents while her brother and mother work in the city. Her cousin has returned from university for the summer and remarks how much more difficult it is to readjust to rural life than it is become used to urban living. It seems much hotter here than he remembered, he’d never have thought to bring a hat, and given the ongoing drought they now farm corn rather than rice. The young man asks if America is more ecologically friendly than China, which seems like an ironic question but prompts Li into a reconsideration of her own relationship with the natural world along with the uncomfortable reminder that as she walks through America she treads on the land of another displaced indigenous people. 

Li celebrates Lunar New Year with the villagers and only hears of an imminent lockdown and a mysterious new disease that seems again like a kind of rebuke for the way mankind has treated the Earth. Presented with a choice, she can’t decide whether to stay or go and reflects that far from uniting us the pandemic has presented only more division. But then even on her return to the US she finds new ways of being and echoes of a more traditional culture in a local community garden that reminds of the way the villagers live tending to the earth with togetherness and replacing what one takes in a gentle symbiosis with nature. 

Using mainly English when talking about her life in America and Mandarin for that in China, Li laments she knows no Nakhi and has lost touch with her culture which seems to be retreating even further in the face of encroaching modernity. Even so, she begins to reevaluate the balance of her life while asking if it’s already too late or if we, like her ancestors, can find new ways to repair our relationship with nature and learn to live in harmony with it once again. Li’s poetic voiceover lends a touch of melancholy to her exploration of all we’ve all lost in a bid for modernity but also perhaps a note of hope that scorched earth can still be replanted though it may take many hands to do so. 

Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC and is available to stream in the US until Nov. 26.

Flowers of Mold (너를 줍다, Shim Hye-jung, 2023)

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The heroine of Shim Hye-jung’s Flowers of Mold (너를 줍다, Neoleul Jubda) isn’t wrong when she says that you can learn a lot about a person from the things they throw away, though it also helps to explain her nature as an emotional hoarder like the pet fish she only starts keeping as a way of feeling close to a handsome neighbour unwilling to come out of her cave. Based on a story by Ha Seong-nan, the film is in essence an unexpectedly sweet romance but also a mild critique of the disconnected nature of urban living in which everything has already been broken down to its essential components in an overly ordered, judgemental society. 

The disposal of rubbish, for example, is ridden with rules the breaking of which invites censure from a self-policing society as Ji-su (Kim Jae-kyung) discovers when she’s hauled in front of a trio of middle-aged women who put her on trial for inadvertently including inappropriate items in her regular rubbish, acting as if what she’s done is worse than murder and an indication of a deep ill will towards the community. In an odd way, this might be what sparks Ji-su’s strange hobby of rooting through her neighbour’s bins and keeping detailed records of them in a frustrated attempt at one-sided connection. She’s similarly conscientious at work, accepting belligerent calls from a customer who always complains that his meal kit deliveries have spoiled under the justification that he seems to work late and they should have just added an evening delivery tag even if he neglected to ask for one. She makes a similar suggestion that another customer with a young baby sometimes forgets to add not to ring the bell, so she goes ahead and adds that to her delivery note just in case.

“This is the age of big data” she jokes, but few us really like to be seen in this way and often we throw things away because we no longer like the self that owned them. Ji-su’s overbearing mother is forever telling her to get to rid of old things and buy new in a consumerist fantasy that novelty equals happiness, which might help to explain Ji-su’s reluctance to give anything away possibly afraid of the judgements others may make of her. An unfortunate encounter with a duplicitous man has left her feeling naive and mistrustful, needing further information in order to navigate the world and fill the void where real connection should be.

That’s one reason that she unwittingly begins to take on the characteristics of an attractive man who’s recently moved in next door and undergone an very loud breakup with a woman who seems otherwise totally unsuited to him and indeed understands him far less than Ji-su who has begun to build a profile after trawling through his trash. Perhaps wanting to know more only a natural consequence of falling in love, but it’s also an undeniable invasion of privacy that threatens to destroy a relationship even before it’s begun.

Even so, Ji-su begins to poke her head outside of her cave even deciding to take a leaf out of Woo-jae’s (Hyun Woo) book and take a leap of faith so out of keeping with her characteristic risk aversion. Cripplingly shy, she admits that she’s still afraid of people and in the end unable to trust them, remaining somewhat closed off and unknown perhaps even to herself. Then again, a teenage girl who’d originally reacted angrily to her well meaning advice later thinks better of it and wants to thank her “for her attention” being one of a few people who seems to have really seen her and taken an interest in her wellbeing in the midst of an indifferent city. 

Shim often cuts back to the anonymous apartment blocks, presenting an ersatz world of uniformity echoed in the meal kits Ji-su sells at work which reduce a complex dish to its component parts removing all sense of creativity or spontaneity. Woo-jae’s improbably possessive ex Sera describes him as “boring”, but perhaps he’s simply a man who knows how he likes to live much as the fish do and as he suggests it doesn’t always work out when you put two different kinds in the same tank. If Ji-su wants to break free of her self-imposed isolation, what she needs to figure out is how to give more of herself away and gain by doing so, accepting but also looking past someone’s trash to whatever it was they decided to keep.

Flowers of Mold screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Total Trust (Zhang Jialing, 2023)

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“The government strives to provide a stable society, fair legal system, and quality services to ensure the fulfilment, happiness, and security of its people,” according to a news reader at the beginning of Zhang Jialing’s documentary exploring the contemporary surveillance state of the modern China, Total Trust. In recent mainstream narrative cinema, there has a been a clear message that the Chinese citizen is safe nowhere other than at home, but here other voices tell us that threat comes not only from abroad but from within and the co-operation of all citizens is necessary to ensure the nation’s security. 

Early scenes see what others may regard as busybodies enforcing public order by picking up rubbish or monitoring minor parking infractions, but it’s precisely this sense of oppressive community pressure that “social management” systems are designed to create. Utilising cutting edge technology, the authorities harvest big data to assess the “trustworthiness” of the ordinary citizen and accord them a rank which then affects all aspects of their lives from their ability to gain or maintain employment to the right to use public transport. Social responsibility is rewarded with points for the above mentioned activities but also for keeping an eye on your neighbours and ensuring they aren’t planning to do anything “subversive” while your neighbours also watch you. 

But this trustworthiness is not so much towards the society as it is towards the Party. Many of Zhang’s protagonists are lawyers and their families who were targeted during a recent crackdown and charged with subverting state power because they defended those who claimed they’d been falsely convicted of crimes which is problematic because the Party cannot be wrong and it doesn’t make mistakes. Chang Weiping was arrested in 2020 and sent back to his hometown for house arrest leaving him separated from his wife and son. He recounts frequent torture which caused him permanent physical damage while his wife has also found herself targeted by the surveillance state after protesting his imprisonment. 

Other families report similar harassment. Wenzu Li’s husband Quanzhang Wang was imprisoned because of his championing of human rights and though he’s since been released the couple have effectively been banned from social media with any photos featuring their faces automatically removed by AI technology and the accounts that posted them limited. They are constantly watched while the police have also motivated their neighbours to monitor and shun them. After being invited to speak at an international conference, their door is blocked by mysterious mask-wearing neighbours who physically prevent them from leaving (they later appear at the conference via Zoom). Their son has also had to change schools almost every term because of the persistent harassment and their own low social credit ranking.

As another persecuted journalist, Sophia, points out after generations of censorship, a degree of censure has become internalised and in general people tend to self-censor without necessarily regarding it as an infringement on their freedom. Many people welcome this kind of oppressive “security” because it makes them feel safe while others are too afraid of the potential consequences to resist. Weiping’s wife takes his father to task for giving up on the campaign against his imprisonment as he remains reluctant to challenge the Party of which he has been a lifelong member, while he agrees that he is simply old and frightened and doesn’t want to be subjected to state harassment himself. 

Weiping’s wife eventually decides to emigrate to the US believing there is no future for her son in China while Weiping himself remains imprisoned. The journalist makes plans to study abroad in the UK, which might in itself be ironic given the increasing authoritarianism of the British government. The UK is already one of the most surveilled places in the world and similar kinds of AI-based facial recognition technology are already being employed in law enforcement. In any case, she is arrested at the airport and prevented from the leaving the country before being detained and charged with the same “subverting government power” line as the lawyers. According to the closing titles, she remains in prison. Emergency powers introduced during the pandemic have only enabled a wider authoritarian power grab with authorities now able to manipulate “health ratings” to silent protest or otherwise make lives unliveable by simply switching the reading to red meaning that the target can be arrested simply for leaving their home. Citizens may need to reevaluate the “trustworthiness” of the government but are of course prevented from doing so in a society in which their every movement is already closely controlled.

Total Trust screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Summer (그 여름, Han Ji-won, 2023)

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A rueful young woman meditates on first love while losing direction in the city in Han Ji-won’s nostalgic adaptation of the story by Choi Sun-young, The Summer (그 여름, Geu Yeoleum). Set in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the film finds an unexpected optimism for better future even in a society perhaps (even) less tolerant than that of today, but equally positions opposing reactions to their queerness as a force which erodes the innocent romance between two girls who met in high school and fell in love along with the more obvious stressors of city life such as social class and aspiration.

As Yi-gyeong later admits, “everything changed when we moved to Seoul”. Han depicts the tranquil rural town where the girls grew up as place of light and warmth, a kind of eternal summer of memory. Yet perhaps there’s something in the fact that when they first meet, footballer Su-yi accidentally breaks Yi-gyeong’s glasses rendering her at least temporarily unable to see clearly. A connection develops that first leads to an awkward friendship and finally to love, but where as a naive Yi-gyeong plans to come out and live openly as a lesbian, Su-yi is terrified and withdrawn. A few mocking sneers from her classmates show Yi-gyeong that Su-yi may have had a point and there are reasons they may have to keep their relationship secret.

Yi-gyeong’s inner conflict is reflected in a conundrum over her hair which is naturally lighter than than that of the uniform black of the girls around her. A teacher often stops to tell her to stop messing with it, leading her to wonder if she shouldn’t dye it the “correct” colour to be the same as everyone else thereby erasing her otherness and symbolically rejecting her homosexuality. She is also teased for having hazel eyes which are to some the eyes of a dog, and it’s Su-yi’s straightforward gaze into them that eventually brings the pair closer, Yi-gyeong feeling seen and accepted while Su-yi calmly tells her not to pay so much attention to what others think.

Yet for Su-yi the words are a double edged sword. Her way of not caring what other people think is to retreat into a bubble in which only she and Yi-gyeong matter, as if the rest of the world simply did not exist. Yi-gyeong, however, wants more. These divisions between them become even more palpable in the city when Yi-gyeong begins frequenting and then working at a lesbian bar which Su-yi still afraid to step into preferring to keep her relationship with Yi-gyeong an entirely private matter.

Han shrouds the city in shades of cold, blue and grey while the summer of their hometown gives way to a harsh winter. Where an orange cat had basked in the sun on Yi-gyeong’s desk, in the city a starving kitten shivers in an alleyway as if symbolising the love between the two women which is no longer being cared for or sheltered. While Yi-gyeong lives in a university dorm studying economics, an embittered Su-yi has given up her football dreams to become a mechanic while living in a dank room with mold on the ceiling that causes her to feel as if she’s compromising Yi-gyeong’s health simply by inviting her over. 

Conversely, as Yi-gyeong integrated more closely with the community through working at the bar she begins to grow apart from Su-yi, beginning to look down her as a working woman visibly irritated when she finally shows up at the bar but in her work clothes with grease on her face. Her new friends immediately put their foot in it by asking what Su-yi is studying at uni only to cause her embarrassment as she admits she didn’t get in and is doing a manual job instead. Yi-gyeong has to admit that what she feels is shame, now harbouring desires for city sophistication and nice middle class life as symbolised in her nascent crush on a slightly older nurse seemingly much more at home with who she is. 

But even so, an older Yi-gyeong can’t help asking herself why she swapped her dull but idyllic hometown for the emptiness of urbanity while meditating on the failure of her first love, wondering if she was wise to give it up or in the end betrayed both herself and Su-yi in her desire for something that was “more” than this without appreciating its innocent fragility. Poignant in its sense of melancholy regret, Han’s hazy drama lends a touch of warmth to Yi-gyeong’s infinite nostalgia for the endless summer of first love that in its way for her will never really end. 

The Summer screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Ashima (Kenji Tsukamoto, 2023)

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A teenage rock climber wrestles with the pressures of parental expectation and early fame in Kenji Tsukamoto’s probing documentary, Ashima. A champion of bouldering, the titular Ashima is climbing prodigy who has her eyes set on being the youngest person to complete a V14 climb, a feat only one woman has ever completed before and even veterans take years to conquer. But then she herself and the documentary seem to ask at what cost her victories may be coming when she’s so busy looking up she doesn’t have much time for what’s around her.

As Ashima sadly points out, at times it feels as if her father, Poppo, a retired butoh dancer now living in New York, is her only friend. Her love of climbing leaves her little time to interact with children her own age and she can’t really make friends with other climbers either given the competitiveness of the environment. It’s also an unavoidable fact that at her level most of the competitors are adult men with whom she obviously can’t have a lot of meaningful conversation. At one point, we see her paint her nails like any other teenage girl though they’ll be chipped soon enough when she needs them again for climbing and she seemingly has little social outlet outside of sports. Her parents reassure her that friends can be fickle and family is forever but however well-meaning there’s no denying that the phrase has uncomfortably possessive overtones.

That maybe something further echoed in her relationship with Poppo who acts as her climbing coach and mentor admitting that his teaching methods are rooted in his experiences as a butoh dancer and necessarily strict. Even Ashima later reflects that having her father as a coach can be frustrating as she feels as if he doesn’t listen to her or make an effort to see things from her point of view. He often gives her harsh advice about mental toughness and fortitude insisting that if she feels cold it’s only proof that she isn’t sufficiently focussed while allowing a sense of failure to mess with her head after repeatedly falling while trying to plan a difficult climb. Ashima reflects that sometimes it’s like he’s her best friend, but also a worst enemy who knows how to push her buttons and has no qualms about doing so. 

Ashima seems to feel her responsibility to her parents keenly, not least as Poppo has encouraged to her meditate on the disappointment her mother and sponsors would feel if she did not complete her climb. Her mother meanwhile recalls that she wanted her to be a person who inspires the world which is quite a heavy burden for young girl to bear adding to the sense of pressure and isolation Ashima seems to feel even while adding that climbing is also her dream too. Ashima is an only child of older parents who underwent infertility treatment for several years before she was born and is obviously a deeply treasured daughter though one who also knows that and feels acutely guilty while reaching the age which she might wish to have more independence. 

In any case, a journey to South Africa with her father develops into a spiritual confrontation both with herself and with him as she contemplates the V-14 climb and is forced to face her self-consciousness and insecurity in order to literally climb the mountain. Tsukamoto intercuts footage of her seemingly easy victories at indoor competitions with her lowest moments as her wounded confidence begins to eat away at her quite literally preventing her from getting a purchase on the rock. In an ironic touch, the chalk covering her hands echoes the white makeup worn by butoh dancers, the strange chanting and yelling rituals apparently aiding a breakthrough that allows Ashima to rediscover her self-confidence and complete the climb. Speaking at a Ted Talk, she reflects that climbing is mostly finding an accommodation with failure and falling is a normal part of the climb not something to be feared or ashamed of. As Poppo later concedes, it’s Ashima’s life to explore even if she rolls her eyes slightly to hear her parents cheerfully discussing the possibility of attempting a V15 having discovered at least a path that’s her own as much as it is anyone else’s.

Ashima screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

A Normal Family (보통의 가족, Hur Jin-ho, 2023)

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“Parents are weak before their children” according to an apparently doting dad in Hur Jin-ho’s A Normal Family (보통의 가족, Botong-ui Gajok), yet later he will have to ask himself what it means to be a father and what exactly it is that he’s raising his daughter to be. Based on the Dutch novel The Dinner and a departure for Hur who is best known for romantic melodrama, the film nevertheless takes aim at the chaebol culture of the contemporary Korean society in which consequences are only for those without means. 

Twin cases further exacerbate the rift between two brothers, cynical lawyer Jae-won (Sol Kyung-gu), and earnest doctor Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun) as one finds himself defending the feckless son of a wealthy industrialist, and the other doing his best to save the life of a child seriously injured when a case of road rage resulted in the death of her father. Meanwhile, the brothers’ respective children, Jae-won’s daughter Hye-yoon (Hong Ye-ji), and Jae-gyu’s son Si-ho are later the subject of a viral video which appears to show two teens beating a homeless man half to death. 

Jae-gyu had resented his brother and rejected the idea of Si-ho doing an internship at his hospital on the grounds that he wants him to grow up to be a person with “integrity” rather than one who’d unfairly use his privilege and connections to get ahead. Yet as time moves on we begin to wonder if it isn’t also a little because he’s ashamed of his son who is socially awkward and apparently struggling academically. His wife Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), meanwhile, is a classic helicopter parent who spends an evening out repeatedly calling Si-ho’s phone and irritated when he doesn’t pick up. The implication is that they’re so hellbent on getting Si-ho into a good university to fulfil their own sense of esteem as parents that they’ve raised a child to conventional success that they’ve lost sight of what might actually be best for him as a whole individual.

On realising Si-ho maybe the violent teen in the video, Jae-gyu’s first instinct is to go to the police but he soon loses his moral authority on failing to follow through. Once again, the question is whether they choose to protect Jae-gyu from the consequences of his actions because they fear for him or because they fear the embarrassment his criminal status would bring to them. On the surface, Jae-woo has no such qualms, immediately torching the dress Hye-yoon was wearing that night while going into damage limitation mode trying to keep the teens’ identities secret. Yet he must also reckon with the fact that he’s brought her up in a world without consequences in which conventional morality no longer really applies to her because she is wealthy and has an elite lawyer for a father. 

In any case, just as Jae-gyu’s morality began to crumble so Jae-won begins to wake up to the idea that perhaps it’s a problem that his teenage daughter and her cousin beat a man half to death and then went back to their lives without batting an eyelid. Hye-yoon shows no remorse, cheekily asking her father for a car he promised her if she passed her exams while later expressing the view that as the man was homeless, a person who in her eyes had failed to achieve personhood through attaining markers of conventional success such as a degree and steady job, his life was of no consequence. Yeon-kyung later says something similar, not understanding why they’re making a fuss over “someone like that” whose life is worth nothing in comparison to her son’s future. 

Yeon-kyung is also relentlessly rude to Jae-won’s second wife, Ji-su (Claudia Kim), who is from a much more ordinary background and does everything she can to try and get along with her. Ji-su presents a much more conventional moral compass in considering what kind of mother she wants to be not only to her own newborn child but to Hye-yoon who like Yeon-kyung mainly treats her with contempt. It’s she who begins to wonder if covering this up is really the right thing for Hye-yoon and Si-ho or if failing to show them that actions have consequences will only encourage them to behave in ways otherwise offensive to a commonly held sense of humanity. 

The brothers switch sides, but the truth is that each of them has been teaching their children the wrong lessons in creating a world in which money settles everything and consequences are only for those who can’t pay. Yeon-kyung tries to justify herself that as she’s done a lot of good deeds it somehow balances out, Si-ho too echoing her on suggesting going to church as if you could buy your right to behave badly by saving up goodness points which is also another way of saying that consequences don’t apply. The children think that as long as they fulfil the role they’re expected to play, get good grades and become successful members of society, then nothing else really matters. Darkly comic, Hur’s steely drama suggests that the inequalities of the contemporary society, the elitism and anxiety have slowly eroded not only the most essential of relationships but the soul of the nation’s children who know nothing other than those with money need not pay for their crimes.

A Normal Family screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)