Promotion of documentary,
Hope of alternative film

KIM Young-jin Chief programmer, Jeonju International Film Festival

 

Let’s take a moment to look at the context in which dramatic movies became so sloppy. Since <Breathless, 2008> by Yang Ik-joon created a sensation, the number of theater audience recorded by the film 120,000, is the record that Korean independent feature film is hard to reach again. It was a long time since it was in 2009. It is not that <Breathless, 2008> is not talked to many people because it is well-featured by independent feature film. The film had a strong sense of disagreement and there was the optimistic outlook that other movies would inherit in the independent film industry at that time. It was exposed to anger at society at a level that could not be included in an already-established film, and it seemed like a signal to announce the coming of the next generation that the unknown director and actors did do it until then. Unfortunately, the signal was illusory and literally stopped in the hope of love.

The physical basis of independent feature films that the film brings more than 100,000 people means more than 10 million of commercial feature film is poor. The majority of the staff work with the guarantee of the level of talent donation in the low-budget independent feature film, actors who are still unknown are also involved in this work for the purpose of building a career. Almost the only line is a fund from the country, through Lee Myeong-bak and Park Geun-hye governments, the equation that the independence film soon became an anti-government film lies in the minds of the regime elites so the size of this fund has ridiculously shrunken. The social atmosphere in which the new word “Hell Joseon” became popular was formed and the despair of young people has fallen into self-reliance, not anger based on hope. The trend of independent feature films have also changed little by little. The cynical self-contemplation of vegetable humans who express the micro-routine of young people working at a convenience store or living in the rooftop room and barely hang out in an invisible life became the main trend. Otherwise, movies that aim to low-budget commercial genre storytelling movies out of the investment filtering of tight commercial films became the majority.

The documentary field seems a little different. While independent feature films are become flexible and the distinction between low-budget genre movies is getting faint, independent feature-length documentaries have created controversy by expanding the materials to the areas of political and social taboos that feature films cannot deal with. Even if it starts from a personal problem, ultimately it is much more candid and bold than feature films in terms of expanding the material to the social agenda. Over the past five years, I have been programming in Jeonju International Film Festival, and I realized that most of the films that would not be chosen from the Festival but I watched them to the end were documentaries. Regardless of perfection, there were vivid stories and images in the documentaries with which feature films did not deal. Compared to standardizing and concluding a life based on the custom of meeting audience expectations framed as feature films were the grammar of the story, documentaries were the things intuitive to life abundantly without catching.

I’ll explain this topic a bit more for an example of a documentary that has been screened at Jeonju International Film Festival in recent years. (We apologize to the people at DMZ International Documentary Film Festival!). First, in the case of works that deal with social and political problems, a typical example of a journalistic approach that seeks to identify the truth from the victim’s frame is <Spy Nation, 2016>, which was released last year. Before that, <2 Doors, 2011> by directors Kim Il-ran and Hong Ji-yoo also showed similar attempts to reconstruct the context of the incident and try to reach the truth with more dramatic tension than a feature film. Choi Seung-ho of <Spy Nation, 2016> sets up the director himself and the staff with cameras as the actors in pursuit of the contextual truth and he does not care about their appearance on the screen. The director and the staff are diligently moving the cameras to bring the perpetrators to manipulate them as spies as well as the victims manipulated as spies to the screen. The reporters go to China and prove it with a camera to check the authenticity of the documents manipulated by NIS. It’s like Michael Moore’s showmanship since <Roger & Me, 1989>, the attitude that I’ll meet with opponents on the side of truth and justice, attach and ask for opinions, but in this case, surprisingly, it completes the narrative that a journalism approach reveals the truth and justice wins temporarily.

What <Spy Nation, 2016> contains is the contents that a TV current documentary program would cover in the old days and could be the subject at which he was good when director Choi Seung-ho was in the station. As the media environment deteriorated over the past decade, broadcasting programs dealing with the truth of current affairs have disappeared, and it may be pointed out that a social environment that a documentary like <Spy Nation, 2016> attracted attention degenerates but <Spy Nation, 2016> was not a television documentary format, but a sufficient format for a theater feature. In addition to kindly showing the evolution of the case and commenting it, the tone of dealing with the context of the incident in multifaceted way and editing that waits for the audience to breathe in every interlude of scenes, or in the process of developing one shot and giving the audience a chance to think for themselves proved that this journalistic documentary could be screened in the theater.

<Spy Nation, 2016> has played a role in bring a current material to the narrative scale of a documentary for the theater, complementing the short and clear breath of the television documentary, but it’s a trend nowadays that works which are successful in matching private materials and social trends with a very personal home documentary movie are more and more. For the documentaries screened in Jeonju International Film Festival this year, there are the director’s family history based on real estate speculation(real estate investment nowadays) and <Family in the Bubble>, 2017 by director Ma Min-ji who brought out the light and shade of Korean modern history. This documentary deals with the life of the director’s parents who bet their life on real estate investment in the boom of urban development and shows the daily life of one family which everything vanished like a bubble in IMF foreign exchange crisis after they were once rich persons but overpaid for overpayment. The speaker, the director catches the desire for money of her parents still dreaming of a chance to recover and the daily life of her family who is barely enduring poverty in fine detail and reflects on the footsteps of modern Korean history distorted by real estate capitalism. What is interesting is that the history of this family is presented not only as a tragedy but as a comedy, as a routine. She does not really want to try any specific analysis and her mother becomes a complex, attractive and contradictory character that cannot be expressed in any feature film. Her mother who has strong ability to maintain her livelihood and is very sociable and has a willingness to never be discouraged lives with a unbeaten belief in real estate investment, the plot of this documentary which lightly criticizes the social system that massively produces lots of losers, is more vivid than any analytic paper apart from the individual beliefs.

<Myeoneuri – My Son’s Crazy Wife, 2017> by Sun Ho-bin’s documentary is also excellent in capturing the common social conflicts in individuals’ lives, it contains the shadow of the old custom sticking persistently to the form of modern life as a self-destructive satire, by shooting the rebellion of a young female individualist against the legacy of pre-modern patriarchy in a consistently light observation tone as a material of the conflict between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, which is common in Korea. This approach is more devastating because the camera’s speaker is the husband of the main character, the daughter-in-law. The director with a camera laments why people with warm personality separate the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law and make them enemies by sympathizing with the rebellion of the protagonist, his wife sometimes and annoying her sometimes. The chronology of this struggling conflict and confrontation does not come to a definite conclusion. This is the reason why we are forced to proceed to an unsolved progression because it is part of the real life. The resentment toward patriarchal convention like a prison where the characters are trapped enough to cause claustrophobia in a recurring snowballing conflict appeared in the screen at the same time, it’s also phenomenal that the main characters live somehow cheerfully even in such a situation.

If you think of the tendency to put in a cinema bowl seeking a journalist approach that the established media cannot contain and the tendency to match micro-routine with macro-socio-political flow as two recent documentary trends, <Blue Butterfly Effect , 2017> by Park Mun-chil embraces these two trends at the same time. If his debut, <My Place, 2013> reminds us of the history of Korean society suffering from the aftereffects of the Cold War era in the history of the family of the director with political differences, <Blue Butterfly Effect , 2017> observes how they regenerate themselves truthfully as politically awakened citizens? in the daily life of the actual inhabitants of a village that the director did not know. In this film about Seongju residents against thaad deployment, women who chose to live in Seongju to make their children play are worried about the contamination of the space and then realize this is not only their own children. It is the virtue of this documentary that it is not only through a passionate speech at the struggle scene but also through natural sense in the daily lives of these people. When they return to their jobs and work as the days of organizing the struggle against thaad when they cannot enjoy their small pleasures of everyday life continue, when they see that they carry out the values of sharing and empathy already embodied in their daily lives, the scenes create a great harmonic effect and produce a great echo in front of the endless ending. They show an impressive attitude toward internal enemies that interfere with fighting, the neighborhood vested interest including Seongju governor and those who sympathize with them, they act against the internal interferes strongly in a great hateful situation but they are humble and courteous about the fact that the interferes may be someone’s father or mother.

These virtues of documentaries that have been mentioned so far are often shown in the opposite way in feature films. In recent years, Korean commercial feature films have attracted the attention of the public with a narrative metaphor for catastrophic disasters in Korean society and the narrative’s internal dynamics are deceptive and exploitative. The composition of a tragic pathos through this, that a great disaster arises and the protagonist is trying to save his/her family and other people and follows someone’s death inevitably falls into the trap of unethical self-contradiction created through artificial tragedy to respond to the expectation of the audience. In recent years, I think that the attempt to simultaneously capture the microscopic and macroscopic lives of documentaries is much more meaningful as an antidote to commercial films like this. Alternative flows are taking place more strongly here. The attention to the distinctly uplifting flow is that documentaries are attracted in several film festivals(DMZ International Documentary Film Festival) including Jeonju International Film Festival in future, even if we do not mention the miraculous success stories of <Our President, 2017>, more and more documentaries will take on the platform effects of film festivals and succeed. It is not doubt that the future of DMZ International Documentary Film Festival will be successful in such a way.