Tag: Hong Xa-bin

Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Lee Jong-pil, Yoon Ga-eun, Jang Kun-jae, 2025)

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Made in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Cinecube cinema in Seoul, Time of Cinema (극장의 시간들, Geugjang-ui Sigandeul) is an anthology film featuring three segments and bookended with a sequence set in the venue as a young woman takes lessons from the projectionist while classic films such as Ozu’s Late Spring play in the background. As such, each of the films has a kind of meta commentary on the nature of film, the industry and buildings as well as the impact it can have on people’s lives even if they happen to fall asleep during the movie.

This kind of reflexivity is evident in the opening segment, Chimpanzee, which features its protagonists recreating the dance from Godard’s Bande à part. This segment also is set across two time periods and is revealed to be “a film” based on the recollections of the director’s youth in which he spent time watching movies with two close friends while in the military. This sense of loss for shared experiences of the past is something that echoes through the other sequences and in the last seems as if it could in some senses be returned through unexpected reunion. In any case, the director appears to reclaim them through imprinting his memories in the film as a means of reliving them. Its protagonists also have a kind of truth revealed to them that something they assumed to be merely a legend was perhaps true after all.

The second sequence, meanwhile, directed by Yoon Ga-eun plays with the nature of film itself as we’re show several scenes that turn out to be in progress shots from the filming of another movie in which a collection of little girls are asked to repeat the same scene in a frustrated attempt to make it seem more “natural.” At the end, they all sit down to watch the film they’ve made, but this is also a part of the “film”, while we have also already been watching them, leading us to ponder on these many levels of refection within the video footage. Well known for her films featuring children such as The House of Us, Yoon gets the most from her young cast while at the same time demonstrating how difficult it can be work with child actors even if what she mainly does is to leave them to their own devices, capturing their spontaneity and enthusiasm in the most natural way possible.

The third sequence meanwhile is more firmly rooted in Cinecube and explores the less glamorous side of filmmaking in taking a leaf out of Goodbye Dragon Inn’s book as the cleaning lady walks up and down the aisles collecting rubbish even if, as they mentioned in the first segment, this place is too fancy to sell popcorn. Though the cleaning lady rarely has time to watch any films, she ends up running into an old friend who’s just come in to use the bathroom and pressures her into seeing whatever’s playing which happens to be a special screening of a movie with a director Q&A. The old friend’s name also has the same pronunciation of the word for “film”, and though she and everyone else in the cinema falls asleep, her time spent there seems to return something precious that she had lost while she also reunites with her old friend.

In this way it paints cinema as an interactive experience and all the more so when visiting a cinema rather than watching passively, or inattentively, though a TV screen. By the same token, it shows the cinema staff working hard from the put upon box office lady trying to tell a desperate cinephile that he’s arrived too late to enter the auditorium and, in any case, has booked his ticket for the following day, to the cleaning lady and projectionist who meticulously keeps an eye on everything, both digital and analogue, to ensure that the film is being projected as intended. Cinemas are in that sense social spaces in which people share experiences with both strangers and friends while in some ways unaware of the relationship that’s arising between themselves and the screen and the images that may also be changing them in ways untold.

Time of Cinema screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Escape (탈주, Lee Jong-pil, 2024)

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Lee Jong-pil’s existential action drama Escape (탈주, Talju) opens with scenes of a man running. He runs his way through the rest of the film, continually on the move and chasing a dream of freedom outside of the oppressive society in which he is otherwise trapped. The man who chases him, meanwhile, is himself running away. His movements are slow, calculated, and cold but also somehow tender and almost it seems an act of self harm. 

The fact that the oppressive regime is North Korea is almost irrelevant and the film is less about Communism than it is lack of autonomy that may be found in any other democratic or developed nation in which people are driven to erase a part of themselves in order to fit in or to prosper amid rigidly defined social codes. Nevertheless, there is a direct criticism of the Democratic People’s Republic in the ironic signage, a car ploughing straight through a sign that reads “for freedom and happiness of people”. But then, even if deserter Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) finds happiness in the South we can’t be sure it’s really any better. The welcome message blasted through loudspeakers over the wall that marks the border doesn’t sound all that different from the propaganda messages on Kyu-nam’s radio, while the deserter’s phone positioned to appeal to men like him appears to be out of order. 

But to Kyu-nam, “the South” is only really an idea and it’s clear he intends to transcend those borders too, venturing on to the wider world and wherever it pleases him to go. What he rails against is fate, that his life is dictated by forces outside of his control or more accurately by Field Officer Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) from State Security who takes him under his wing and tries to make something of him as a loyal soldier of the North. What becomes clear is that Hyun-sang is a man who fears freedom and that the presence of a man like Kyu-nam is a threat to him because he awakens his own deeply buried desire for liberation. 

From the longing looks he directs at a man with whom he studied abroad in Russia we infer that Hyun-sang is gay and the suppression of his authentic self in order to keep himself safe in a repressive culture has made him cruel and vindictive. Unfortunately, this presumably unintentionally plays into a homophobic trope which aligns queerness with sadistic villainy, but does nevertheless lend a kind of poignancy to Hyun-sang’s otherwise vindictive quest to prevent Kyu-nam’s escape precisely because he himself desires to be free but is too afraid to free himself. From a wealthy and prominent family and with an important position within the regime, this system otherwise works out well for Hyun-sang but he is also imprisoned by it and will forever be prevented from becoming his authentic self or gaining what he truly wants so long as he remains within North Korea. 

A homoerotic charge exists between the two men though what Hyun-sang may really be chasing is himself and half-hoping he’ll be caught. Kyu-nam meanwhile has a single-minded desire for autonomy and individuality, to live and die on his own terms rather than live with no right or power to decide his future. There are those who’ve found other ways to reject the system, a group of mostly female nomads seeking a new place to belong after being kicked out of their village but seemingly with no intention of leaving the country, but for Kyu-nam there is no freedom inside the walls and his determination to find it is what makes him so dangerous to Hyun-sang for whom the very idea of freedom is so painful he’s sublimated himself entirely into an oppressive regime.

With pulsing synth scores, Lee keeps the tension high as Kyu-nam runs and runs through minefields and bullets while pursued by the full force of the North Korean army and the steely Hyun-sang who always seems to be one step ahead. His passage takes on an existential quality, risking death rather than continue to live a “meaningless life” in which he has no power to decide his own fate. His escape is finally self-liberation, taking the decision to free himself because no one else is going to, while Hyun-sang remains a prisoner too afraid of freedom to actively pursue it though perhaps tempted by his encounter with Kyun-nam, a man free in his mind if nowhere else.

Escape screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

US trailer (English subtitles)

The Killers (더 킬러스, Kim Jong-kwan & Roh Deok & Chang Hang-jun & Lee Myung-se, 2024)

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Led by Lee Myung-se, The Killers (더 킬러스) was originally billed as a six-part anthology film featuring different takes on the short story by Ernest Hemingway, but somewhere along the way took a kind of detour and now arrives as a four partner with a looser theme revolving around noir and crime cinema. Frequently referencing the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, the film hints at urban loneliness and a haunting sense of futility along with the mythic quality of noir as a tale that tells itself.

At least that’s in part how it is for unreliable the narrator of the first episode, a petty gangster who wakes up in a mysterious bar after being cornered by rival thugs. While in there he meets a similarly lost, middle-aged film director in the middle of a strange date with a fawning young woman who’ve definitely wandered into the wrong place. A sense absurdity is echoed in the fact that the man continues to sit in the bar oblivious to the knife in his back until the bar lady pulls it out for him and exposes the real reason why she lures lonely souls to this strange place out of time. Even so, thanks to her dark initiation the gangster is able to become himself and stand up against the rival thugs who were bullying him with his newfound “feistiness” having overcome something of the futility of black and white, classic noir opening sequence.

That’s something that never really happens for the heroes of part two who are a trio of youngsters trapped in Hell Joseon unable to escape their lives as cut price contract killers working below minimum wage for a chaotic company in which everything has been sub-contracted into oblivion. Ironically, one had dreams of becoming a policeman and another a nun while the third has recently had plastic surgery in the hope of landing an acting gig and claims he’s not in this for the money but to make the world a better place. Seeing their work as a public service, they tell each other that it’s wrong to grumble over their unfair pay because other people get less and are otherwise incapable of standing up for themselves until they take a leaf out of the boss’ book and try a subcontracting of their own which doesn’t quite go to plan.

While the first two episodes had been set in the present day the second two are set during the long years of dictatorship, the first sometime in the 1960s under the rule of President Park as an undercover detective and two men who appear to be unsubtle KCIA agents descend on a noirish, rundown bar with a picture of Nighthawks on the wall waiting for a mysterious fugitive to arrive. They don’t appear to know anything about why their target needs to be caught or who he is save for a daffodil tattoo on his arm and are merely they shady figures of authoritarian power we can infer are hot on the tracks of someone hostile to the regime. In any case, they are they are about to have the tables turned on them in a demonstration of their inefficacy in their power.

It’s the fourth and final piece unmistakably directed by Lee himself, however, that brings the themes to the four as it opens with an allusion to the assassination of President Park as the narrator tells us that it is 1979 and someone sent a bullet into the heart of darkness but the darkness did not die. The two goons who later show up are KCIA thugs working for the new king Chun Doo-hwan come to threaten the denizens of the cafe which include a man called “Smile” because he can’t and a woman called “Voice” because she has none while trapped inside an authoritarian regime. Inhabitants of Diaspora City, a home to the exiled, they have only a small hole to another world which affords them the ability to dream. Relentlessly surreal the segment is marked by Lee’s characteristic visual flair and sense of noirish melancholy that extends all the way out to a world more recognisably our own though no less lonely or oppressive.

The Killers screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Hopeless (화란, Kim Chang-hoon, 2023)

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“Why is everyone out to get him?” the stepsister of the hero asks, wondering why it is that everything in his life seems to go wrong. As its name suggests, Kim Chang-hoon’s Hopeless (화란, Hwaran) take places in a city of despair in which lives are largely defined by violence and money while a young man dreaming of a utopian future in Holland is dragged even further towards an abyss of crime and immorality.

As the film opens, a school boy picks up a rock and hits another on the head. The boy, Yeon-gyu (Hong Xa-bin) goes on to explain that he couldn’t let it go as they live together, hinting at a possible slight against his step-sister Hayan (Bibi) that he avenged more out of a code of masculinity than a genuine desire to protect her. Then again, Yeon-gyun often masks his true feelings and struggles to express himself in any other language than violence. At home, Hayan is his protector against her father, a violent and embittered drunk who makes Yeon-gyun’s life an unending hell. 

Attacking his classmates gets them to leave Hayan alone, but also to double down attacking him while he’s also liable to pay a large settlement his family can’t afford. Yeon-gyu is gifted the money unexpectedly by sympathetic gangster Chi-geon (Song Joong-ki), but his life is upended once again once again when his step-father leaves him with a nasty scar around his eye. The boss at his part-time job fires him because of it and no one else will hire him leading him straight to the gang to ask for a job. 

Yet Yeon-gyu continues to dream of escape to peaceful Holland, looking at sunny scenes of windmills and flowers while torn over his new criminal career. Though bonding with Chi-geon over a shared sense of parental disappointment and emotional abandonment, Yeon-gyu is uncomfortable with the moral dimensions of his crimes in feeling sorry for the people they rob including a man whose young son is hospitalised and in a coma because of the gang’s violence. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the gang has political ambitions and has been bankrolling a particular candidate for an upcoming election. When the gang discuss taking out a rival, Yeon-gyu suggests blackmailing him illicit photos instead so no one ends up getting hurt .

Yeon-gyu asks Gi-cheon questions about their violence and he often tells him that these are just things that they have to do as if it were an automatic operation of the gangster code. He describes himself as already dead, a ghost of the child who drowned when his father abandoned him on a lake but takes on a quasi-paternal role over Yeon-gyu seeing him as a younger version of himself equally betrayed by corrupted paternity. Yeon-gyu in turn looks up to him, but continues to mess things up for himself by trying to help the people they’re robbing.

It does indeed seem as if everyone is out to get Yeon-gyu who finds himself engulfed by despair and hopeless, unable to see a way out for himself from his desperate situation. The irony is that a lack of communication eventually results in a kind of tragedy, but one that one ultimately frees both Chi-geon and Yeon-gyu from a word of self-destructive violence allowing Yeong-gyu to renounce it once and all and seek a better future with Hayan in a less a less hopeless place. What Chi-geon had tried to offer was in effect brotherhood, a surrogate family and a home, explaining that Yeon-gyu would be a perfect fit yet Yeon-gyu struggles to play the role assigned to him unable to put aside his humanity to commit the acts of theft and violence the gang expects. 

The irony may be that Yeon-gyu’s mother only married the violent stepfather to protect herself from the unwanted attentions of another man, attempting to fight male violence with a male protector but finding herself once again victimised. Violence arises from insecurity and an inability to communicate and it’s no wonder that Yeon-gyu finds himself caught in its snares while struggling to break free of the futility that surrounds him. Kim captures his sense of despair in his steely camera contrasting the blue skies of Yeon-guy’s Dutch dream for the grimy streets of his rundown neighbourhood but does eventually discover renewed hope for a better future in the choice to walk away from a world of violence towards one of compassion and solidarity. 

Hopeless screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)