Impressions of South Korea Today

In its 16th edition, the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival hosted its first ever FIPRESCI Jury.

At the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in Goyang, South Korea, the FIPRESCI jury was asked to view the ten films in the Korean feature length selection, which provided a broad overview of the contemporary national documentary output. While the overall tendency among the films was to employ a more traditional documentary style where talking heads prevailed, some tried to venture into a more experimental domain.

One of the most noticeable things among the selection was that many of the themes were repeated, clearly demonstrating the prevalent issues occupying the South Korean society’s interests today. For example, two of the documentaries, Between Goodbyes (Jota Mun) and Everything That Connect Us (Tout ce qui nous relie, Jung) followed two Korean-European women, who had been adopted as babies and returned to their homeland to explore their roots. One raised in the Netherlands, one in France, they had very different relationships with Korea. These were also the only co-productions in the competition (Korean-US and Korean-French, respectively), displaying sensibilities that set them apart from the other films in the competition.

Another pair was two dance films featuring disabled main characters. On the Wings of a Butterfly (프로그램, Jinsik Hyun) follows Ahra, a deaf young woman and a dancer who explores music in a new way when she gives birth and wants to sing a lullaby to her baby. CONATUS (소영의 노력, Jaehyeong Oh) is a collaboration with Soyoung, another young woman who expresses herself through dance, despite having difficulty controlling the minute movements of her body. By giving Soyoung control of the camera, CONATUS goes beyond the observatory mode that would have been a safer, but mundane mode of storytelling.

 Several films were invested in the struggles of environmentalists and agriculturalists, a theme that resonates around the world in the age of climate change. All That Saves Us (바로 지금 여기, Taeje Nam, Jeonghyun Mun, Jinyeul Kim) and Flower Cow (꽃풀소, Joongwan Leem) both follow young environmental activists, who get involved with older generations of farmers as well as global farming movements. Pull (풀, Soojung Lee) focuses on a single crop: hemp. The film unabashedly advocates for the plant, illegal in South Korea only since 1976.

Korean Dream: the Nama-jinheung Mixtape (코리안 드림 : 남아진흥 믹스테이프, Taewoong Lee) is a compilation documentary that makes use of the vast archives of Nama-jinheung, the now-defunct Korean film company that was active between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Although it is fascinating to watch all the clips, their arrangement is somewhat disjointed. Another film that has captivating source material is the strikingly-titled Check Out Me Smoking Before Suicide Attempts (자살시도 두 시간 전 담배 피는 영상, Jiyoon Kweon). Told in the first-person, the reflexive documentary ruminates on the rising mental health issues among the young, and the alarmingly increasing suicide rates in South Korea. It was perhaps the most stylistically daring film of the selection but suffered from a running time of over two hours.

Finally, 1980 Sabuk (1980 사북, Bongnam Park), was another two-hour-long documentary, but its thorough usage of archival material and its care and balance in conducting its interviews more than made up for its length. Telling the long-forgotten story of a “disturbance” and its aftermath in the mining town of Sabuk in 1980, when South Korea was under the rule of the martial law, Park displays a wonderful skill in conveying a multifaceted story that still resonates today.

Melis Behlil
Edited by Yael Shuv
© FIPRESCI 2024