Ways To Watch Hong Sangsoo

The San Francisco International Film Festival begins Thursday with a Castro Theatre screening of The Two Faces of January, a pan-European thriller based on a Patricia Highsmith story. I'll be covering the festival as press once again, but momentarily turn my blog over to my friend Adam Hartzell, who has already shared his enthusiasm for one particular SFIFF selection (which is near the top of my to-see list as well in the coming weeks) in podcast form and at the koreanfilm.org, and now here. Thanks, Adam!

A scene from Hong Sang-soo's OUR SUNHI, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

Although Hong Sangsoo's 14th film Nobody's Daughter Haewon (2013) appears, for now, to have skipped San Francisco, we have three screenings of his 15th film, Our Sunhi (2013), thanks to the programmers of the 57th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Hong snagged a Silver Leopard for Best Director at the Locarno International Film Festival for Our Sunhi. Hong's films tend to be festival favorites for folks who come to festivals for so-called 'challenging' films.

 

I don't really like that word 'challenging' because it sounds pretentious. It seems to imply that if you don't like the film or if you don't 'get it', it's because you aren't up to par intellectually. It is perhaps better to say Hong's later films, let's say post-Turning Gate (2002), are films that step outside of the standard film narratives we expect. Even when the narratives appear to be heading in a direction with which we are familiar, such as the art house favorite of two opposing narratives of the same event, à la Rashomon, Hong might even be complicating narratives we think we know. As Marshall Deutelbaum of Purdue University has noted, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000) might seem like a he-said/she-said indie narrative, but Deutelbaum argues convincingly that it can also be read as one continuous narrative.

 

Part of what I enjoy about Hong's films is how he disrupts my genre demands of narrative. This is why I will be watching all three screenings of Hong's film at SFIFF. But if you aren't ready for Hongian narratives, the films can be frustrating. And although sitting with website our frustrations can lead us towards new insights, (I myself no longer own a car because my frustrations with trying to find parking in San Francisco enlightened me to the value of a car-free life), it can also be helpful to come to a Hong film prepared.

 

I do not want this to be seen as a 'How to Watch Hong Sangsoo's Our Sunhi', because similar to the word 'challenging', that can be pretentious too. These are merely suggestions of 5 ways to watch Our Sunhi that I hope will be helpful. Thankfully, we have a diverse array of films on display at SFIFF. To modify the cliche, if Hong isn't your cup of soju, there are many more visual libations to savor.

 

1) Don't expect a typical narrative. Let go of your standard reading strategies. This doesn't mean that Aristotle's tragic fall from grace or the reverse can't be applied to a Hong film. Perhaps there are some Campbellian myths in there. But I feel one can benefit by letting those strategies go while watching a Hong film and see where things settle afterwards rather than trying to impose Hong's films into standard story framing devices.

 

2) Even those who don't enjoy Hong Sangsoo's films enjoy his drunken soju table shot scenes. As Marc Raymond notes, Our Sunhi has his longest table shot scene to date. Tense moments often arise at these tables. Hong is not interested in alleviating this tension. He wants you to sit with the awkwardness. Be ready for that.

 

3) If you can only watch one film before this one, consider Nobody's Daughter Haewon if you can find it. Hong's second feature-length film to focus primarily on a female character, and his first to focus on a Korean woman, it provides an excellent template for how Hong has advanced his roles for Korean women. This is not to imply that South Korean films don't provide quality vehicles for actresses. Many South Korean films do. Hong's films just provide something different. Women who flail and make poor choices amongst calculated ones. Women as insecure and pathetic and obliviously confident at times just like Hong's men.

 

4) Expect repetition across films and within. Yet if you yourself engage in repetition and watch the film more than once, you will see the nuanced differences in each rinse and  repeat. Seriously, buy a ticket for two screenings at SFIFF if not all three like me. Not only will you catch the significance of what appeared to be insignificant moments in your first screening, or moments you completely missed the first time, but you'll catch the subtle adjustments to what appeared to be completely repeated motifs previously.

 

5) Read up afterwards. Hong's is a literate cinema. His films are enhanced by reading what folks have written about his films. (For example, if you like to get your Lacan on, check out Kyung Hyun Kim's two books on South Korean cinema, The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema and Virtual Hallyu. He tackles Hong's first 3 films in the former and next 3 films in the latter.) You can't really ruin a Hong film by reading about it before, but even if you are anxiously spoiler averse, read the essays inspired by his films afterwards. That said, Hong's cinema is also a salon cinema. They inspire discussion. Whether that discussion happens in print, pixel, or in the ephemeral space of words spoken, it's not that you will find things 'making sense', it will be that the senses of Hong's cinema will be accentuated by the cinephilic syllabi and symposia of writers and conversationalists whom Hong's films inspire. Hong's films aren't finished after the closing credits. In some ways, that's when his films are just getting started.

Adam Hartzell Only Has Two Eyes

It's impossible for any pair of eyes to view all of Frisco Bay's worthwhile film screenings. I'm so pleased that a number of local filmgoers have let me post their repertory/revival screening highlights of 2011. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from Adam Hartzell, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in sf360, koreanfilm.org, Kyoto Journal and elsewhere.

As much as I've been enjoying the curation provided for the San Francisco Film Society's new screening venue at New People, the only New People events that made my list were before New People became the home of the San Francisco Film Society screenings. Otherwise, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts comes in twice and the Pacific Film Archives once. I went to other rep houses this year, such as The Roxie and The Castro, I even took the train out to Sacramento to catch the Sacramento French Film Festival at The Crest Theatre but none of the films at those venues that fit the parameters Brian requested have surpassed the impact of the five repertory events I list below.
　
5) EVANGELION 2.0: YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE (Anno Hideaki, 2009, Japan) - VIZ Cinema (before it became New People Cinema officially)
　
This anime screening makes my list because it was a fun event, rather than an enjoyable movie. I had never experienced a packed VIZ Cinema before. Not being an anime otaku, I had no idea what to expect. As much as I was bewildered by the plot, I was entertained by the knowledgeable audience appropriating what was most valuable for them on screen. This is film-watching as public performance as opposed to passive reception. So much about watching films for me is about where, when, and with whom I see a film, and this was an example of those three W's being entirely responsible for the enjoyment.
　
4) INTANGIBLE ASSET #82 (Emma Franz, 2009, Australia) - PFA
　
I only ventured to the East Bay for cinema three times this year. Once to re-watch THE TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS (Leanne Pooley, 2009, New Zealand) with my cousin to support its theatre release and once to get a taste of the latest Canadian sensation, Nicolas Pereda during a retrospective on him at the Pacific Film Archive. As much as the latter provided a nice surprise run-in with Michael Guillén, my favorite PFA experience was with Emma Franz's travelogue of jazz drummer Simon Barker's musical discovery of Korean drummer Kim Seok-chul. It's not a perfect film, but it is a film on a topic I've been wanting to see for a while. I still don't fully comprehend the nuances needed to appreciated Korean traditional music forms, but INTANGIBLE ASSET #82 got me a little bit closer on a journey that I still have a long ways to travel.
　
3) CENTRE FORWARD (Pak Chong-song, 1978, North Korea) - YBCA
　
What a wonderfully rare opportunity to watch a North Korean film. YBCA never ceases to amaze me with the surprises they roll out on celluloid (and, yes, occasionally on pixels). But the best YBCA event was clearly . . .
　
2) THE JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT (2000-2010).- YBCA
　
The highlight of my cinema events this year, YBCA brought all the shorts that were part of the Jeonju International Film Festival Digital Project since it began in 2000. (Unfortunately, two of the shorts were missing from what was sent to YBCA.) There were so many gems amongst the lot. James Benning's simple drama of a steel refinery loading up it's molten product into awaiting trains in PIG IRON (2010), Darezhan Omirbaev's reworking of Checkov in modern Uzbekistan in ABOUT LOVE (2006), Bahman Ghobadi's real life artisans in DAF (2003), and my favorite director Hong Sangsoo's first short ever, LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS (2009). This also provided the opportunity to see two shorts I've been anxious to see for some time, Eric Khoo's commentary on domestic laborers in his native Singapore in NO DAY OFF (2006) and Bong Joon-ho's incredibly entertaining appropriation of surveillance cameras in INFLUENZA (2004). Just like YBCA, neither disappointed.

1) THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE (Ozu Yasujiro, 1952, Japan) - VIZ Cinema (now New People Cinema)
　
Ozu fails to disappoint me and so often completely enthralls me. This one even won over my wife, who is not (yet) a fan of older Japanese cinema. Simply put, I left with a smile on my face after watching this film that lasted throughout the weekend. Here's hoping SFFS keeps this tradition of occasional screenings of the older Japanese masters at New People!

BANG BANG: Akiva Gottlieb

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

by Akiva Gottlieb

The movie I most wanted to evangelize for all year—at least before Margaret started kicking down doors—was usually synopsized in embarrassing fashion. Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, in prose courtesy of IMDb: “A sixty-something woman, faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime and in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, finds strength and purpose when she enrolls in a poetry class.” Yes, every word of this heartwarming short story is technically accurate, but the implied causality is almost willfully misleading. In actuality, her discovery of the heinous crime is sublimated, her awareness of her Alzheimer’s is either denied or forgotten, and if she finds strength and purpose when enrolling in a poetry class, it’s not the result of anything she learns there.

The perverse irony of this unpredictable, quietly devastating film is Lee’s framing of his protagonist’s terminal illness as less of an impediment than an enabler—it causes her to forget, but just as crucially gives her license to walk away from trauma. Poetry’s most resonant mysteries pivot upon the impossibility of knowing the difference between a selective memory and a faulty one.

Lee’s film is an object lesson in everyday escapism, and if he never indicts the movies as our favorite emotional management tool, he probably expects we’d repress that knowledge anyway. Poetry draws a precise visual map of those other places we hide from what we don’t want to know—behind locked doors, under the covers, in the shower, in a karaoke bar, in a poem—and the negotiations we’re willing to make with ourselves and others to keep an ugly truth from coming to light. This is not a chronicle of disease and triumph, or finding one’s voice, but a testimonial to compartments and evasions. Poetry’s poetry lessons allegorize the process of emotional disengagement as a method of scaling back, limiting one’s scope, concentrating. To repress one memory might just be way of focusing more intensely on another. A debilitating illness is a tragedy, but Poetry discovers a state of grace—or at least a deferral of inevitabilities—in being lost for words.


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Akiva Gottlieb writes about film for The Nation, but does not write poetry. He lives in Michigan.

BANG BANG: Adam Hartzell

BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.

by Adam Hartzell

I spend most of my time watching movies out of sync with my time and place. Since I prefer cinema from elsewhere, only one U.S. film makes my Top Ten, though it does make the top spot. Work and financial constraints keep me from traveling abroad for film festival premieres, which means I have to wait until they make it here to San Francisco. So my Top Ten lists usually say something about my cosmopolitan dreams that are anchored awake by my restricted finances and mobility. But here are 10 films which were released this year, or made their way to Bay Area festivals in 2011, about which I have found myself still ruminating in a positive way since they shined their light and heat on my eyes.
　
10. Passion (Khusel Shunal) (Byamba Sakhya, 2010, Mongolia) I knew nothing about Mongolian cinema until this documentary about said cinema, told through a lonely road movie, found its way into the program of this year's San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival. Now I want to know more, which is ironic since the film presents a pessimistic view of Mongolian cinema's future. But it's at least caught the fascination of one viewer even more isolated from this nation's cinema than the Mongolian residents portrayed in the documentary.

9. Aurélie Laflamme's Diary (Christian Laurence, 2010, Canada) A French language film from Quebec that was part of the NY/SF International Children's Film Festival that ran from October 21-23 at Viz Cinema, it ended up winning an audience award. I would have voted for it as well, had I seen it in the theater along with that awarding audience rather than on DVD for an sf360.org overview I wrote on the festival. It's a teen film that doesn't have to throw an American-Pie in our faces thinking that will entertain the kids and kidults. Marianne Verville is a refreshing presence in the lead role, allowed to be awkward in what is an awkward time of our lives. Plus, although she gets the boy the genre demands, she isn't swan-ed away from her duckling beginnings.

8. The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2011, United Kingdom) I am still laughing about the scene where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are riffing on announcing the inexact time of an ancient battle. Adding to this comedic pleasure was that I got to laugh at this scene along with a friend I hadn’t seen in some time whom I randomly ran into in the lobby of The Bridge theatre before the screening. It was a nice day in the Richmond neighborhood thanks to the run-ins such local establishments afford.

7. Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo, 2010, South Korea) I got to see three of my favorite director’s films for the first time this year. (The others were Ha Ha Ha on DVD because I couldn't make the screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival and The Day He Arrives on screen at the Starz Denver Film Festival in mid-November with the proprietor of the Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee blog, Peter Nellhaus.) Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, I was able to watch Oki's Movie in the theatre in late June after having already seen it on DVD to prepare a piece for sf360. I'm biased in that I always find something to ruminate on endlessly in a Hong film (even with my least favorite, Woman Is the Future of Man). But Oki's Movie seems to have won over those who haven't been fans of his work. I think a big reason is the auditioning of men in Oki's movie nested within "Oki's Movie" that Andrew Tracy expertly analyzes in the Fall 2010 issue of Cinema Scope magazine.

6. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls (Leanne Pooley, 2009, New Zealand) Finally getting the theatre release it deserved, The Topp Twins graced our local screens outside of the film festivals that started the momentum (Frameline in 2010 and Mostly British in 2011). I own the DVD and saw the film in the theatre three times, once each at those festivals and once in Berkeley at Shattuck Cinemas with my cousin when it was released. Even after all these screenings, I'm still moved by how much major moments of the lives of these yodeling, country singing lesbian twins are tied up with major political successes in New Zealand history. I am still giddy about getting to meet them for an interview for sf360, the most nervous I have ever been for an interview.

5. Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010, South Korea) Poetry definitively represents what I have been appreciating lately about South Korean cinema - how much it has opened up cinematic space for its senior actresses. Yun Jung-hee came out of retirement for this virtuoso performance of Lee Chang-dong's as he continues to explore the life of the outsider in South Korea. During my first draft of this brief commentary on Poetry, I went into a rant about how, if there failed to be a Best Actress nom nod to Yun, the Oscars would continue to be irrelevant in my cinematic life. But after writing that draft, I went to talk with Brian Darr of Hell on Frisco Bay blog and he informed me the Los Angeles Critic Circle gave Yun their Best Actress award. As a result, I put my seething rage at the Oscars as a failed institution back into its cage to be unleashed some other day.

4. The Salesman (Sébastian Pilote, 2011, Canada) I am someone upon whom car commercials fail to make the intended impact. I don't desire the products they advertise. And I don't buy into the false sense of freedom the commercials purport to symbolize. (The streets are usually much more crowded than as portrayed in the commercials and buying a car shackles you with debt, high gas prices, and vast acres of asphalt requirements for roads and parking.) That said, I'm primed to appreciate the tragedy in The Salesman, a perfect example of a genre I'm calling 'Post Peak Oil Cinema', where the life of a successful car salesman is turned on its head by the very products he sells so successfully. The Salesman is a sad, sad film that doesn't pummel you but rather slowly piles upon you like the snow that surrounds this little Quebec town.

3. The Life of Fish (Matías Bize, 2010, Chile) My wife and I caught this film during our yearly Caltrain trip to Cinequest in San Jose because it fit with our schedule and it's one of those happy accident, eeny-meeny-miney-mo(e)ments where you select a film with no real sense of what you are getting yourself into and you realize the programmers have made an excellent choice for you. In this film, we travel through a party held in a single house as our main character relives his younger self through his memories and those of others. Simple, poignant, and delightful.

2. Nostalgia for the Light (Patrico Guzmán, 2010, France/Chile/Germany) This was a truly amazing film I saw in the Dolby screening room as part of the press screenings for the San Francisco International Film Festival this year. Guzmán’s pairing of professional astronomers with amateur archaeologists works on so many levels. Even though the archaeologists are searching for the remains of family members killed by their own government, somehow, in spite of all this, Guzmán leaves us with tremendous hope for humanity.

1. Deaf Jam (Judy Lieff, 2011, USA) I have not had the experience with a film for a long time like I had with Lieff’s documentary about high school Deaf poets venturing out into the venues of a (hearing) poetry slam. Cinema transfixed me again at the Mill Valley Film Festival like it did the first time I could not stopping about the impact a film had on me. Lieff captures the vibrancy of American Sign Language through several tactics of translation. Her willingness to mess with the text of subtitling the poems in the opening sequence is mesmerizing. At the same time, she even took the risk not to translate the ASL later in the film and it is just as powerful sans subtitles. Mixed in with this story of the life of young Deaf folk is a story about the struggles of immigrant children whose parents’ citizenship comes after they enter adulthood and a friendship between a young Israeli Jew and Palestinian Muslim. Lieff and the subjects of her documentary show us how ASL is as perfect a language of cinema as any other, leaving you hoping Lieff and the students she films don’t stop here. We need these stories. We need this kind of active, engaged cinema.

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Adam Hartzell is totally bummed that sf360.org is no longer publishing because he had a blast writing for them for three years. He continues to write for Brian Darr's San Francisco film blog, Hell on Frisco Bay, and the premier English language website on South Korean cinema, Koreanfilm.org. He began this year as a guest on an episode of the VCinema podcast where he discussed the original version and the recent re-visioning of the South Korean classic The Housemaid (MP3). He has had a few magazine pieces in Kyoto Journal, a chapter on The Power of Kangwon Province for The Cinema of Japan and Korea (Wallflower Press), and next year he will have a bunch of essays in the upcoming publication of World Directory of Cinema: Korea (Intellect, Ltd.).

SFIFF54 Day 6: HaHaHa

The 54nd San Francisco International Film Festival is still going strong. It runs through May 5th. Each day during the festival I'll be posting a recommendation and review of a film in the festival.

HaHaHa (SOUTH KOREA: Hong Sang-soo, 2010)

playing: 3:30 this afternoon at the Kabuki, with no more scheduled festival screenings.
distribution: None that I'm aware of. This may be your last chance to see this film on the big screen.

"Stop dwelling on adolescent things." It's a scolding given by one of the men in HaHaHa to the woman he's infatuated with, but it could as easily be applied to just about any male character in any Hong Sang-soo film. Invariably Hong populates his movies with creative, would-be "sensitive" guys trapped in states of arrested development. Unable to live up to their own high ideals, these protagonists verbally inflict on the women around them countless cutting comments, subtextual rejections, insincere flatteries and transparent lies. When the women stand for such treatment it's only because they're no less insecure than their male counterparts, even if they may express it differently.

HaHaHa provides more opportunities for its Peter Pans to be put in their pre-adolescent place than any other Hong film I can remember (and I'm lucky to have seen all twelve of his thus-far finished works). The mother of laid-off Seoul prof. Moon-kyoeng (played by Kim Sang-kyeung, who also played the male lead in Turning Gate) infantilizes him in conversation with her friends: "He's gotten so big; I wonder if he's really mine." Later in the film she gives him a spanking with a coat hanger, and makes him cry (these are separate instances).

Another male character, an angsty poet, gets a piggyback ride from his girlfriend as if to demonstrate his immaturity after she catches him with another woman. The girlfriend is Seung-ok, played by Moon So-ri, who SFIFF regulars will remember from her terrific turns in Peppermint Candy, Oasis and Sa-Kwa. This is her first time working with Hong Sang-soo and she commands attention in every scene, not least her outburst while on-duty as a historical park guide who defensively shouts down a tourist who dares to question the accuracy of the heroic histories she's there to impart.

Hong is always motivated to explore the elusiveness of absolute truth, and as usual he does this by dividing HaHaHa into two complimentary (or perhaps competing) stories: a recounting by Moon-kyoeng of the highlights of his seaside hometown visit, and a parallel recounting by his friend Joong-sik, who coincidentally was visiting the same town with his mistress at the same time. Only the audience gets to see just how close the two men came to bumping into each other, as they frequented the same locations, often with some of the same locals alongside them. Along with the dialogue, these close calls provide much of the humor that helps earn the film its title.

What makes HaHaHa different from any other Hong feature is the typical bifurcation is not a temporal cleave between the first and second halves of the film. Rather, Moon-kyoeng's and Joong-sik's stories are alternated and interwoven throughout the running time. This "normalizes" the film somewhat, which may be why it's the first of Hong's films to have energized a few former detractors I'm spoken to. As a devotee, I find this new approach refreshing and intriguing as well.

When writing about Hong's other 2010 release Oki's Movie (which comes to YBCA June 23 & 26, incidentally), Marc Raymond suggested that "perhaps no other director is less repetitive than Hong," which on the face sounds like an even more perverse provocation than Hasumi Shigehiko's (via Max Tessier) that Yasujiro Ozu is the "least Japanese of all directors." But there's truth in both claims. Perhaps HaHaHa and Oki's Movie (also an obvious structural departure from Hong's usual template) will help observers (including fans such as myself) better see how to distinguish all of Hong's films from each other, despite their surface similarities.

SFIFF54 Day 6
Another option: Chantrapas (GEORGIA/FRANCE: Otar Iosseliani, 2010) In contrast to Hong, I've only seen one of Septuagenarian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani's films, the delightfully Tati-esque Monday Morning, but it's not the fault of the SFIFF that I haven't seen more. They've shown ten of his films over the past thirty years, and this year's US Premiere screening of Chantrapas serves as a tribute to SF Film Society board chair George Gund III, who is a particular fan of the Georgian director, who is expected to be in attendance for tonight's 6PM screening.

Non-SFIFF-option for today: Valley Girl at the Red Vic in a 35mm print. I've never seen this flashback from 1983, which was a breakthrough for both director Martha Coolidge and star Nicolas Cage, and begins a two-night stand at a theatre that got its start in the 1980s.

No Day Off and the Jeonju Digital Project

Eric Khoo's No Day Off introduces us to Siti, a 24-year-old woman who uproots herself from her home in Sulawesi to attend a two-month training institute on another Indonesian island, so that she can become a live-in maid in one of the world's per capita richest countries, the city-state Singapore. She leaves behind a husband, a new baby and a mountain of debt, which she hopes she will be able to pay off by sending her salary home to the family. However, Siti's debts will grow before they shrink, as the recruiter, trainer and placement service demand such a large cut of her first year's worth of paychecks, that she'd barely be able to afford busfare downtown, even if she did have a maid's day off. As the title indicates, she doesn't; her entire existence is shown to be structured for the convenience and whim of the three distinct families she slaves for over the course of this 39-minute video work.

We catch nothing more than fragmentary glimpses of these employers, as the camera is always trained either on Siti or on the houses and objects she must attend to. The Singaporeans in the film are for us no more than disembodied voices, making demands on or insulting Siti in a language she barely understands. The first family is English-speaking and imperiously wealthy; a bottle of wine costs them more than their maid's salary. As alienating and confining as their mansion must feel to Siti, at least she doesn't have to subsist on unfinished scraps from their dirty dishes, as she does at her second set of employers, a financially struggling Chinese-speaking family that eventually cannot afford to pay her at all. Siti's third and final placement is in the home of a terminally ill father and his often-absent daughter. By far the most benign of the three employers, this household speaks a language Siti can comprehend (presumably Bahasa Melayu, one of Singapore's four official languages, and which I understand is similar, if not essentially identical, to the lingua franca of neighboring Indonesia.) A genuine bond is developed between the maid and the dying man, but it only makes more heartbreaking the moment when Siti must stand by emotionless as the daughter mourns her loss.

No Day Off takes on aspects of a polemic, evidenced by Khoo's insertion of title cards bearing data on the proliferation of the maltreatment of Singaporean immigrant maids between certain segments of the narrative. But, because of the matter-of-fact, diaristic storytelling (each scene is marked by a timestamp indicating how many days Siti has been away from her home and son) it's a remarkably humane one, not a surprise from the director of the lovely Be With Me. Siti's story becomes the empathetic stand-in for all the situations aggregated into the data Khoo periodically presents.

Khoo's short is one of thirty-six thus far commissioned by South Korea's Jeonju Film Festival, each a digital "film" created on a low budget by a one of the modern era's most intriguing filmmakers. The new batch of commissions premieres in Jeonju in April, and includes shorts by Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis (who is getting a full retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive next month), and José Luis Guerín. All thirty-three of the other shorts commissioned over the past eleven years of the festival have been screening at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts screening room over the past week or so. No Day Off plays this Saturday at 7PM, along with shorts by Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe, Nymph) and Kazakhistan's Darezhan Omirbaev (Kairat, Kardiogram). Later in the weekend there will be entries by Pedro Costa, Eugène Green, Hong Sangsoo, and six other acclaimed filmmakers.

Unlike my friend Adam Hartzell, I haven't been able to attend each and every one of these screenings, but I have seen a sampling, including a rare few that have screened locally before this year. Hong's Jeonju-set Lost in the Mountains was seen at last spring's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and feels connected to the three vignettes that make up his latest feature Oki's Movie (I caught this excellent Hong film in Toronto, and hope it appears soon at a Frisco Bay festival or other venue). The version of Shinya Tsukamoto's Haze that screened Thursday night as part of the YBCA series is a condensed (though hardly less intentionally grueling) version of the hour-long existential horror movie that was presented here by IndieFest back in 2006. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Worldy Desires screened at YBCA a couple years ago as well, and I was very pleased to be able to revisit it in anticipation of the week-long release of Apichatpong's outstanding, entrancing new feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at the San Francisco Film Society's dedicated screen at the Kabuki theatre, surely this season's theatrical release most eagerly awaited by the cinephiles in my circles. Worldly Desires takes place on a film set using day-for-night technique in the jungle, just as Uncle Boonmee uses day-for-night filters to achieve a sense of the eternal.

What the Jeonju project provides its filmmakers with is a kind of carte blanche they might have trouble obtaining in the increasingly commercialized world of film financing. The results are as varied as the directors themselves, but what they all surely have in common is that they represent a distillation of the fundamental desires each harbors as an image-maker. In the case of Eric Khoo, and perhaps also of James Benning, whose Pig Iron is a compelling single-shot portrait of the back end of a German steel factory, a socio-political point can be made, whether about immigrant labor or the environmental impact of our species' industrial processes. In the case of Apichatpong, or of Tsai Ming-Liang, whose A Conversation With God is a documentary compilation of Tawianese religious rituals and urban landscapes, the opportunity to purposefully create low-budget video work helps put into relief the filmmaker's approach to 35mm feature filmmaking. In all cases, these filmmakers' works are scarcely if ever shown here on Frisco Bay, which makes YBCA's initiative in showcasing the Jeonju Digital Project a real boon for local cinemagoers.

Adam Hartzell's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from writer Adam Hartzell, who regularly contributes to sf360, koreanfilm.org, and Hell On Frisco Bay:

10 & 9) DIARY OF A LOST GIRL (G.W. Pabst, 1929, Germany) THE FLYING ACE (Richard E. Norman, 1926, USA) - Silent Film Festival at the Castro Theatre in mid-July
　
Of the four films I saw at 2010’s SF Silent Film Festival, these two are the standouts, particularly THE FLYING ACE due to my interest in portrayals of disability, in which a character played by a single-leg amputee finds a clever use for his crutch when (if I recall correctly) chasing a villain.
　
8) SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (Park Chan-wook, 2005, South Korea) at VIZ Cinema in early August.
　
VIZ provided us a chance to revisit THIRST and Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy this summer. It was a pleasure to re-visit SYMPATHRY FOR LADY VENGEANCE, more awake this time, since my first viewing was a drowsy one in Toronto. I must ask, though, when will we ever get a chance to see his first two films before JSA?
　
7) BEFORE TOMORROW (Marie-Helene Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu, 2009, Canada) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of a curated FASTRUNNER Trilogy of Canadian First Nations films in early April.
　
This was a film where the discussion with Cousineau afterwards added so much to the film. The YBCA film series makes me so happy so often.
　
6 & 5) M. HULOT’S HOLIDAY (Jacques Tati, 1953, France) & TRAFIC (Jacques Tati, 1971, France) at YBCA as part of a Jacques Tati retrospective in late January/early February.
　
Tati is so much fun. And although nothing compares to a 70mm screening of PLAYTIME, these two films didn’t disappoint. Now onward soon to the Tati screenplay animated in THE ILLUSIONIST.
　
4) WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE at the Clay Theatre in mid-March as part of the San Francisco International Asia American Film Festival, a curation of omnibus shorts by Apitchatpong Weerasathakul, Jia Zhang-ke, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hong Sangsoo.
　
Let me sneak this one in here, because film festivals do provide an opportunity for first-run theatres to have a brief flash of repertory-ness. And, come on, Weersathakul, Jia, Tsai, AND Hong!!!??? It’s an Asian all-star omnibus! And possibly my new favorite film by my favorite director, Hong Sangsoo.
　
3 & 2) EARLY SPRING (Ozu Yasujiro, 1956, Japan) & RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMEN (Ozu Yasujiro, 1947, Japan) at VIZ Cinema as part of a brief Ozu retrospective in mid-June.
　
I will never tire of watching Ozu, so to every SF rep house, feel free to bring his films anytime.
　
1) REFRIGERATOR FETISH: VINTAGE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN FILMS (various ephemeral films) as curated by film archivist Dennis Nyback for a series on Architecture and Design films at YBCA in July and August.
　
Freaking amazing! Underscores how important our film archivists are. The gem of the collection was the sumptuous, dazzling color of the National Film Board of Canada documentary on the making of pencils. Seriously, it’s mesmerizing.

Adam Hartzell: Night And Day

For those of us stuck in Frisco Bay, eyeing online coverage of the current Cannes Film Festival, a sense of frustration can quickly set in. Often it takes a year or more for even the highly-critically-regarded titles of the world's most prestigious film festivals to make it to local theatres. Some titles never make it here at all. The best way to console ourselves is to...see other films that are new to local screens or rarely shown. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room is a great place to do just that. Can't wait for Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds to come to Frisco? At least you can watch the 1978 exploitation film that inspired it's title (though perhaps not the misspelling), next week. And this week, the next-to-newest film from another filmmaker with a film playing the French Riviera. Who better than Adam Hartzell to whet the appetite a little? Adam:

Hong Sangsoo’s latest film, Like You Know It All was released this past weekend in South Korea in concert with a screening at Cannes. Although cinephiles in San Francisco will have to wait to know all about that film, we can take pleasure in Hong’s oeuvre of displeasure this weekend with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening of Night and Day, beginning its short run this Thursday.

Those familiar with Hong’s work will see the recurring themes as clear as night and day in Night and Day. Once again we have come hither, go thither gestures between ambivalent lovers, lovers whom we are definitely not intended to find admirable. Carrying onward with Woman on the Beach, Hong brings equal treatment to his male and female portrayals in Night and Day, highlighting the bad in both. In this 8th return to those Hongian themes, we have a painter named Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) who has left South Korea for Paris in order to avoid arrest for the victimless crime of smoking marijuana. Away from his wife, Sung-nam happens upon an old flame. (Hong's films are full of re-encounters.) But rather than the bed-and-retreat, rinse-repeat pattern we’ve come to expect of all main male characters in Hong’s films, Sung-nam strays in ironic ways from this past lover. When he meets a young painter perpetrating talents at Beaux Arts, Hyun-joo (Seo Min-jung), however, that old Hong character pathology rears its pathetic head again.

Tension of the sexual and socially awkward variety is what makes Hong's cinematic worlds go round. Characters behave with borderline nihilistic intensions, which may rile some viewers as Hong’s drunken men rile strangers when drinking. But with every 'repeat' Hongian moment, such as Sung-nam getting something caught in his eye just like Sang-kwon in The Power of Kangwon Province or the obligatory day trippin', Hong has ventured slightly off his well-trodden paths in Night and Day. Sung-nam's aforementioned momentary chastity is one divergence. The drinking scenes are decidedly different as well, blinks of the bug-invaded eye in Night and Day when compared to earlier fixated stares in works such as Turning Gate.

So if you found yourself growing as tired of Hong as Hong's women sometimes do with his men, Night and Day might have you returning to Hong like, well, Hong's women sometimes do with Hong's men. If you have yet to see a Hong film, Night and Day might be the perfect introduction. And for those of you like me who continue to find much to mine in Hong's musings on the pathetic in all of us, Night and Day won't fail to show you how we fail others and ourselves.

Ten Intriguing Films

Between April 23 and May 7, the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival will be bringing nearly 150 films and videos to Frisco Bay, from over 50 countries. No, I didn't go through the program and count them; I'm just taking the word of festival director Graham Leggat, who supplied those numbers in his program guide welcome message. The same message announces plans to build something called the San Francisco International Film Center as part of the Main Post Redevelopment Plan for the Presidio.

At Tuesday's press conference, Leggat talked a little bit more on this project: a plan to build a three-screen cinema to become the home of the San Francisco Film Society's year-round programming. Can Frisco sustain another three screens? What does this do to the Film Society's relationships with existing venues that host SFIFF and other events?

Questions for later, I suppose. Right now I'm still digging through the program guide to figure out a preliminary viewing schedule. With so many films to choose from, I'm tempted to just pick out the films by auteur directors I'm already familiar with, or those that sounded most interesting when described by the programming team at the press conference. Sticking to either of these two strategies is a sure-fire way to miss out on some under-heralded gems. So to fight against that tendency, here's a list of 10 films left un-mentioned by Leggat and his team at the press conference, with pedigrees I know little or nothing about. All images supplied by the festival publicity office.


1. Artemisia

The only Taiwanese production in this year's SFIFF is the feature-length debut by director Chiang Hsiu-Chiung, who in 1991 played one of the sisters in Edward Yang's great a Brighter Summer Day. She has since assisted both Yang and SFIFF regular Hou Hsiao-hsien behind the camera. It has already been announced as the Golden Gate Award winning film in the television narrative category (one of the few GGA categories where the winner is traditionally announced prior to the festival).

2. For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism

Fresh from its SXSW world premiere and resultant press attention is this documentary on one of my favorite love-hate topics, the very nature of film criticism. Just after its first festival screening on the afternoon of May 3, there will be a free panel entitled "A Critical Moment", which is expected to draw appearances from John Anderson, David D'Arcy, Jonathan Curiel, Dennis Harvey, Gerald Peary (the doc's director), Mary F. Pols, and Susan Gerhard. And perhaps others.

3. Go Go 70s

Though this review is merely mixed, I'm always interested in seeing what the SFIFF brings from South Korea. Based on a true story, it apparently proves that 1970s soul music could also be Seoul music. (Ooooh- sorry about that.) It also provides the big program guide with its cover image.

4. It's Not Me, I Swear!

Directed by the maker of Congorama, which I sadly missed at the SFIFF two years ago, this film and its protagonist (who sounds a bit like a morbidly precocious Harold) has been making the rounds on the festival circuit, and proves that the Québec Film Week the SFFS organized last December didn't empty that province of all its cinematic product.

5. Mesrine: a Film in Two Parts

Likewise, the Film Society's French Cinema Now series inaugurated last fall certainly didn't come close to exhausting the supply of fest-worthy films from that country. Including shorts and co-productions France is represented by 21 films in this year's SFIFF, nearly as many as last year when a terrific crop including wonderful stuff like the Secret of the Grain and the Romance of Astrea and Celadon played. This year brings films by well-known names like Breillat, Denis, and Assayas, but of the unknown quantities I'm probably most intrigued by Jean-François Richet. Forget that he was involved in that Assault on Precinct 13 remake I didn't see; he just won the César award for Best Director for this two-part crime epic with an all-star cast.

6. Modern Life

The only film on this list made by a director I've seen work by before: Raymond Depardon. In 2005 the SFIFF programmed two of his documentary features: 10th District Court and Profiles Farmers: Daily Life. The latter was the one I was able to fit into my schedule, and though I heard from many that the other one was the better of the two, I was still fascinated enough by Depardon's approach to his rural subject matter, that I'm now excited to view what appears to be a follow-up in a similar milieu.

7. Sacred Places

Now I'm really kicking myself for skipping Chief! at the Pacific Film Archive's Way of the Termite series, still chugging along with entries from Rouch and Resnais this Sunday for example. It was directed by Jean-Marie Teno, as is Sacred Places, a documentary about cinephilia in Burkina Faso that was inspired by a screening of the earlier film at the FESPACO festival. No matter; I hope to see this anyway. Thankfully an early Teno short (Homage from 1987) has been programmed to give us a taste of the Cameroonian filmmaker's early work.

8. Soul Power

If, like me, you're not much of a boxing fan, you might not remember much of the detail of the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings. But you might remember the concert footage of the "Zaire '74" festival that preceded Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's rumble in the general vicinity of the African jungle. Soul Power was constructed from outtakes from the earlier, Academy Award-winning doc, focusing on the concerts and not the fighting. Presumably someone else somewhere is making a film based on the outtakes from Norman Mailer's interview.

9. Tulpan

OK, so this one's got a pretty bona fide pedigree, having won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the last Cannes Film Festival. That's the same award won by Blissfully Yours, Moolaade, and the Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in case you're wondering. But I still know next to nothing about Tulpan; only what I've scanned from this page. Made in Kazakhstan, by a Kazakhstan-born director, though with funding from some other countries, it also opens at local Landmark Theatres the day after the festival ends.

10. The Window

Three Argentinian feature films play the SFIFF this year, and none of them were mentioned from the podium at Tuesday's press conference. An unintended oversight, I'm sure. This one is directed by Carlos Sorín, who pleased festgoers with Historias Minimas in 2003 and the Road to San Diego in 2007. Despite all the positive word-of-mouth these titles (particularly the former) received at the time, I still haven't seen any Sorín film. This may be the year to fix that.

Want more SFIFF pre-coverage as you start blocking out your schedule? Try the Evening Class for information about the Late Show (films still running as the witching hour chimes), or Susan Gerhard for a more general overview.

27th SFIAAFF Planning Guide

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival schedule is now available on line, complete with a few important changes from the printed schedule. The festival runs March 12-22 in venues all over Frisco Bay, and tickets can be purchased Monday by non-members (member tickets are already on sale). This year's festival is somewhat scaled-down in some respects but it still looks extremely robust, with a strong mix of new works by Asian-American filmmakers and Asian auteurs, and a diverse selection of retrospective screenings.

The latter category includes Diamond Head, a 1962 film about interracial romance in Hawai'i featuring a cast including Charlton Heston, France Nuyen, Yvette Mimieux, George Chakiris, and Philip Ahn. It was directed by Guy Green, who got his start as cinematographer for David Lean's early films. Ang Lee will be at the festival to screen and talk about his 2007 film Lust, Caution on March 17th. SF Cinematheque is co-presenting two programs of 16mm and video work by Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Iimura, including 1962's Ai, featuring a soundtrack by Yoko Ono. And the tradition of spotlighting the filmography of a recent film festival powerhouse from East Asia (after 2007's Hong Sang-soo retrospective and 2008's 3-film Edward Yang tribute) continues with a 7-film spotlight on Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kurosawa is expected to attend the festival himself. Five rarely-seen works from his fertile 1997-1998 period will screen- this period produced Cure, which was the first of the director's films to be widely seen in the West. Cure will not screen, but his perhaps most chilling hit Pulse will. Pulse premiered at festivals in 2001 but was buried for being too prescient of September 11, and unearthed with less fanfare than it deserved. It played in Frisco cinemas a few years ago but I'm sure many missed it and caught up with it on video if at all. Suffice to say its visual frights are more effective in a communal screening environment.

Kurosawa's latest film Tokyo Sonata will screen as part of the series as well. Though his two prior features, Retributionand Loft have still never shown in Frisco Bay cinemas (and I can't pretend I don't wish the SFIAAFF had been able to squeeze them into the festival to catch us up, even while I appreciate the opportunity for immersion in the early films), Tokyo Sonata is stopping that streak in a big way. Not only is it playing the SFIAAFF, but it has two screenings at Cinequest in San Jose, and is planned for a late-March theatrical release in the area. It certainly deserves it. Tokyo Sonata takes Kurosawa's work squarely outside the territory of supernatural horror he's known for inhabiting, by mining the dramatic and comic potential of Japanese family constructions deconstructed. A father clings to his authority when his position is outsourced, by hiding the development behind his salaryman routine, even though he now is standing in unemployment and food lines. His wife is locked into a submissive 'pleaser' role, while their two sons rebel in very disparate ways. The set-up is masterful, and in the final reel or two events breathlessly unravel. A second (perhaps third) viewing is certainly in order. SFIAAFF provides two chances, March 13th and 14th.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing several other new feature films on the program. The closing night film, Treeless Mountain is So Yong Kim's follow-up to the lovely low-budget In Between Days, and like that film is a U.S./ South Korean co-production. The opening night film is a U.S. premiere, also from Korea: My Dear Enemy, which joins director Lee Yoon-ki (of Ad Lib Night) with actress Jeon Do-yeon (of Secret Sunshine) in their first collaboration. The Centerpiece film is the directorial debut of Colma: the Musical actor/songwriter H.P. Mendoza. It's another indie musical shot in Frisco called Fruit Fly, and it plays at the Castro Sunday March 15th, followed by the SFIAAFF's annual Bollywood extravaganza; following last year's audience-award-winning presentation of Om Shanti Om, heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan is back in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. Bong Joon-ho of the Host fame contributes to a portmanteau film with Frenchmen Leos Carax and Michel Gondry entitled Tokyo! And one of the biggest commercial hits of recent Thai cinema, a gay teen romance called The Love of Siam is on hand to represent mainland South-East Asia (there are no features from Vietnam, Malaysia, or Cambodia in this year's program.)

It's going to be hard to fit all of this and everything else intriguing into a workable viewing schedule so picking and choosing is mandatory. But I certainly don't want to miss 24 City, the latest from Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke, who was the subject of a complete retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive last autumn. The PFA is an SFIAAFF venue from March 13-21, and will play 24 City on Saturday afternoon, March 14th - opposite the only screenings of Kurosawa's License to Live, the Love of Siam, one of the two unique Iimura programs, and a conversation with my elementary school-mate Alex Tse (now a successful Hollywood screenwriter with Sucker Free City and Watchmen on his list of credits). Yikes! That's going to be a tough time slot to navigate! Luckily 24 City is also playing at the Kabuki on Sunday March 15th.

Of course I couldn't cover it all here tonight- there's also two competitive sections, one for narrative features and one for documentaries, that I haven't touched on at all. The International Showcase includes many titles I'm wholly unfamiliar with in addition to the ones mentioned above. There's always copious shorts programs, panels and parties as well. Better not make other plans for March 12-22!

Adam Hartzell: Secret Sunshine

Still buried underneath projects, I don't have time to write much; just a reminder that Max Ophuls' Lola Montès opens at the Castro and elsewhere for a week- make sure to catch it at least once before it has to make room for the eagerly-anticipated Milk. Since the film deals so sharply with the way human memory (and collective memory a.k.a. history) colors and exaggerates the truth, it's crucial not to let this spectacle just roll through to the next town; an eventual DVD release is not likely to truly bring out the contrast between the pageantry and fakery on display, and the real emotions felt by the lead character, a contrast so often expressed visually by Ophuls.

Starting with tonight's screenings, there are eighteen more showings of Lola Montès at the Castro and more in other parts of Frisco Bay. But if I could point a cinephile to one single screening that I'd recommend most highly for the coming week, it would be last year's Korean drama Secret Sunshine, possibly the best new film I've seen all year. It has screened only here in Frisco early in the year, and it gets its encore appearance this Sunday courtesy of the San Francisco Korean American Film Festival. Adam Hartzell has more to say:

* * * * *

Traveling around the world while sneaking in film festivals taking place in South Korea between my work stints in Manila, I knew I was riding a wave that couldn’t last for very long, just like South Korean cinema was riding its own time-limited wave of popularity. Financial concerns along with family obligations and work commitments would eventually ground my cinematic globe-trotting. As a result, this South Korean film aficionado has been more incommunicado on the South Korean film scene. I went from assisting the folks at KIMA (Korean in Media Arts) in putting together their San Francisco Korean Film Festival in 2007 to having to fully relinquish responsibilities I had with the festival. Thankfully, the hard-working students and volunteers have done more than fine without me and have put together a lovely weekend of contemporary South Korean films for the cinephiles of San Francisco.

The festival opens and closes at The Richmond district’s 4 Star Theatre, whereas other screenings take place at the Coppola Theatre on the San Francisco State University campus or at the Academy of Art. Opening the festival this Friday is Director Lee Hae-young and Lee Hae-jun’s debut Like a Virgin, a film Darcy Paquet of Koreanfilm.org says transcends coming of age sports movie constraints through its "detailed characterizations and intricate humor". But I’m here at Brian’s blog to add to the innumerable words of praise written about the closing film, Lee Chang-dong’s masterful Secret Sunshine.

Simply put, Secret Sunshine is about loss and suffering without the anchors of a religion/philosophy to impose a narration upon that loss. This is one of the rare South Korean films to explicitly show Korean Evangelical Christian traditions.
At the screening I attended presented by the San Francisco Film Society in early January of this year, Director Lee said he wasn’t intending to critique those traditions in this film. He is honest to that claim, staying away from
ridiculing, a la Bill Maher, the personal relationships with Jesus Christ that Evangelical traditions espouse. We merely watch a young mother attempt to deal with her loss without a sustained belief in supernatural interventions. We the godly audience are as helpless to offer succor as is the local gentleman who attempts to woo this un-woo-able soul at one of the most untouchable times of her life. Both Jeon Do-yeon and Song Kang-ho are excellent in their roles, and one can see easily why Jeon was selected as best actress by the 2007 Cannes jury for this role.

The film came to me at the right time in my life, since I was preparing for my own loss, my father’s death from cancer. Unrestrained by religion myself, I was working through accepting the loss of someone important to me without narratives frames already worked out for me ahead of time by a religious tradition. In this way, Secret Sunshine’s unrelenting turn face forward into the burning tragedy and unfairness of it all was much appreciated. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend this film for people who aren’t in a space where they can fathom the loss of a family member. But for those of you who approach cinema as your church alternative, experiencing the tactility of light from a knowable source, laying its hands upon your eyes as you sort through your own suffering, Secret Sunshine is the homily you come to the movies for. It is a film that will leave you raw, while still enabling you enough strength to reclaim the tough skin that helps you carry on with every new day outside the theater walls.

Adam Hartzell on No Regret

Too busy to get much writing done lately, I've consoled myself by making some hopefully helpful improvements to my blogroll, finally adding links to more Frisco Bay film organizations and bloggers (where possible, the latter will be listed in order of most recent publication).

Even better, my buddy Adam Hartzell has offered up a new piece on a Korean film set to play Frisco Bay starting this weekend. Without any further ado, here's Adam:

My reception of a film can often be affected by where I see a film, especially when I see a film outside of the United States. And being that I’ve had many opportunities to travel to South Korea, seeing certain films in the urban spaces of Busan or Seoul has influenced my take on them. I don’t find it necessary to extract such 'outside' influences from my interpretations of films. I don’t watch films in isolation but in concert with my surroundings inside and outside the theatre, in communion with the time and place of the screening. But when a film I saw in one space enters another space, I find myself in a conundrum, aware that a film I loved seeing in Busan, South Korea might not be so vibrant in its effects here in San Francisco. This is the predicament I find myself in with No Regret, the first feature film from South Korea by an out Gay director, Leesong Hee-il.

No Regret follows the young adult beginnings of Su-he (Lee Young-hoon) as he leaves an orphanage for a factory job that he quits after choosing self-respect over getting-by. But then finding he does indeed need to get by, he ends up in a 'host bar' selling his body while trying to avoid selling his soul. The 'madam' of this host bar is reluctant to bring Su-he on since he’s found gay-identified employees find the emotional demands of the job more difficult to navigate. These complications become personal for Su-he when a lover from his past walks up in the club.

This is a film with an unapologetic Queer 'supertext' that would have been harshly censored in South Korea as recently as the early 1990’s. But the screening I attended in a multiplex at the Pusan International Film Festival in 2006 was packed. (No, that’s not a spelling mistake. The city transliterates its name with a 'B', whereas the festival retains the old 'P' transliteration.) All seats were occupied and even more butts were bumming seats from the steps inside the theatre. The young crowd was a hopeful sign of politics not to come, but already here, a possibly Gay-friendly politics that will lead to future political beefs marching in the streets of Seoul and elsewhere throughout the peninsula. The crowd’s excitement before the screening and uproarious applause after made me happy, despite the overly melodramatic ending.

Yet I worry more about the reception of No Regret in San Francisco. My experience of the political potential of the young Koreans filling the seats of this screening with a palpable energy and anticipation, then their resounding applause of appreciation during the credits, will never be severed from my feelings about No Regret, however flawed a film an 'objective' take without that experience might reveal. I was happy to find it playing at Frameline in 2007 and am even happier to see it picked up by Regent Releasing to screen at the Lumiere Theatre on August 29th. However, since San Francisco is an oasis of Queer films, No Regret could be accused of taking some turns that readers with well-dog-eared copies of The Celluloid Closet might find clichéd. The San Francisco viewer might find the ending in particular to be a bit overly melodramatic and guilty of self-loathing. I excuse the melodrama because South Korean cinema has a long melodramatic history, and such allows this Queer film to nestle up nicely with the history of genre in South Korean film. And as Guy Maddin asked us at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this year, give melodrama a chance, since it enables us to live within our dreams, often something we must suppress during the realities of our everyday. As for the self-loathing, I’d have to ruin the ending to provide my counter-interpretation.

In the end, I’m well aware that in spite of my fondness for No Regret, others might not find themselves smiling at the end of the film in the glow of the future and the hope of the present energized around them in the theatre as I did. Their experience can’t possibly be mine. I will respect how your time and place will affect your interpretation of No Regret when you go see it in San Francisco. But in sharing a little bit of my experience to take with you into yours, I hope you will find it night well spent.