[HanCinema Report] JIFF: Day Four

"Replica" from Youth Voice project

Today has definitely been my most fruitful at the Jeonju International Film Festival so far. Not only can I tell you about the films I saw today, you can actually watch most of them right now! I had the chance to view two collections of short films from the Youth Voice project, which helps teenagers develop short films of their own original design. A lot of these are just plain great- especially considering that they were written, designed, and filmed almost entirely by teenagers. Some of my favorites are below. All of these come with English subtitles, and while they aren't of the best quality, it's easy enough to understand what's happening.

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A stop-motion video about the food that lives in the fridge. Goofy, sweet, and weird, it impresses by sheer tenacity.

A story of awkward adolescent romance, not by adults trying to remember that feeling, but from kids that actually have to live it. Funny stuff.

A group of high school girlfriends take an unusual lesson from a creative exercise in composition. The scheme is soon afoot.

A senior in high school, facing the prospect of graduation, takes interviews of her grandmother and friends as a snapshot for her final project. A joyous reminder of why we idolize the people we do at that age.

http://youthvoice.or.kr/yv_theater/41220

A rather disturbing stop-motion piece that takes a turn for the unsettling and scary. The girl that made this has a rather frightening and intriguing animation.

You can find more videos at http://youthvoice.or.kr/. Don't worry about the site being in Korean- you can find links to all the videos in portraits at the bottom. I highly recommend going through at least a few of these. These kids genuinely make me excited about the world of film to come.

Anyway, as to the rest of the festival, there is still the world of film today. After finishing the Youth Voice screenings, I had a chance to watch "Grandma-Cement Garden" by director Kim Ji-gon. The documentary concerns itself with the elderly residents of Sanbok Road in Busan, forced to move due a city redesign project. The film alternates between extended, static pieces of the neighborhood as it is just on the cusp of disappearing, and intersperses this with the acerbic commentary of the elderly residents, who are both annoyed but also somewhat indifferent to the march of progress through their cement-clad homes. A bit experimental, "Grandma-Cement Garden" feels a bit like practice for a proper film- but is nonetheless an intriguing portrait of a neighborhood's end of days, where what's said has been said, and that is all there is to that. Kim Ji-gon's Youtube Channel has several long excerpts from the film. At present, the only subtitles are in Korean- though even that isn't necessary for the scneery shots. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/user/JiGon0518/videos.

The last film I saw today, in the late hours of night, was "The New World", by director Park Jeong-hoon-I. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting too much from this film, simply because of how utterly exhausted I was working the festival today. But I was utterly riveted by the stark portrayal of the gangsters-versus-cops-versus-gangsters web of intriacy and betrayal. "New World" is fascinating for bringing in melodramatic twists that actually serve to heighten, rather than undermine, the core of the gangster film. These aren't characters who viciously beat the blood and snot out of each other- they have real feelings. And not for their own selfish desires- they display genuine love for other people, even in the most irrational of situations. To explain more would be to give too much away- but this is the rare gangster film I can wholeheartedly recommend even to those who aren't fans of the violence prevalent in the genre.

I have notes from the Q&A session that followed afterwards with Park Jeong-hoon-I, and will post a paraphrase of the session in a later article.

Report by William Schwartz