Interview with Treeless Mountain director So Yong Kim
So Yong Kim talks about her strategies for directing young children and the memories of her grandparents' farm in rural Korea that inspired her intimate second feature, Treeless Mountain.
Hara Kazuo and his "Renegade Cinema"
Out in Los Angeles to promote Camera Obtrusa, a companion book to his 1987 film The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, director Hara Kazuo looks back at the film that made him a legend in documentary circles.
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Grandma and Wrestling
LA Asian Pacific Film Festival 2009: "Right Under Your Nose" shorts
Do you smell that? Short films spread olfactory cheer and hope for future successes. Our critic takes a whiff at Ali Reza Talebzade's The Painting and Lim Hyung-Sup's Grandma and Wrestling.
Shorts films are no easy task. How does an artist communicate all of his of her beautiful ideas in the small space of a short film? One only needs to watch a collection of short films by established auteurs, like the Chacun Con Cinéma series or the Lumiere and Company anthology, where seasoned directors suffer from bloated, artsy obscurantism that can shield themselves with pretention so they can avoid developing any real ideas. It just goes to show that even for the heavies, inspiration for a short film does not come easy.
But shorts are a good starting point for the artist. A short is a significant launching pad that will hopefully propel a new director into bigger things and bigger stories. It's the little seedling that has within it the possibility of the giant oak tree. That is why it's such a pleasure to talk about some films from the VC Festival's Right Under Your Nose shorts series -- some of these films are so deftly and compellingly made that one laments the fact that the short is merely a short, and they have left me wanting just a few minutes more.
Two films that I wanted to highlight from this series are Ali Reza Talebzade's Iranian film The Painting and Lim Hyung-Sup's South Korean Grandma and Wrestling. First, Talebzade's The Painting is the sweetened tragedy of a lonely painter who falls madly in love with a painting that he is doomed to be separated from. Talebzade fills the screen with the painter's passion -- a whole palette of colors comes to stand in as the frenzied artist's inspiration. And he paints for himself his greatest masterpiece, his private passion that serves as the constant memento that he was at least capable of something great once in his life. But a rich man's daughter has seen his painting, and she comes to love the painting too. Sentimental and touching, Talebzade's story is cut from the same cloth as a Chaplin Essanay set-up, and the film's power is that it is nostalgic for films (think Griffith or Vidor) with an almost implausible situation yet somehow has been given a vitality that seems truer than life.
Lim Hyung Sup's Grandma and Wrestling was also quite a neat comedic morsel. It's the story of a young man who does not want to be fixing appliances at his grandmother's house. He's impatient with his grandmother, and would much rather be chasing girls at the mall and hanging around with his friends. But through some insightful conversation with his less-than-typical grandmother, where they discuss the semiotic differences between hardcore Ultimate Fighting and her preferred mode of WWE wrestling that prioritizes style over actuality, the grandson lightens up and warms in affection to his grandmother. It's all the little gags that make this film such a pleasure to watch -- the grandmother with her re-enactment of WWE's Undertaker, the grandson crunching through his grandmother's crab stew and kimchi like a spoiled child, and that final, little note of a grandmother and grandson tussling over a small bill-fold of Korean won.
One hopes to hear more from these filmmakers soon. With never a bored moment in their films, they've got great potential to stretch out and really flourish.
Date Posted: 5/22/2009