Experimental Archives - London Korean Film Festival

Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:22:50 +0000

Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection is a disorienting film that embodies the fatigue and emptiness of material culture and its blinding optimism. Questioning the fast cycle of cultural production, Choi recycles her exhibition into a context and material for a shapeshifting film in which a group of performers play the spirit medium of the unattended. The resulting film enacts trance-like rituals – a dramatic monologue, ghostly rave party and wistful self-affirmation – with an animistic imagination. Colliding references to the horror genre with pop spiritualism, Choi choreographs feelings of disillusionment induced by the pressure to constantly “upload” and “update”.

The film is structured around five poems written by the artist; each draws on a word (over)used in political rhetoric, aphorisms and memes in the Korean language and acts as a prompt for absurd world-building. The recurring motif throughout the film is the word “마음: Ma-eum” (meaning “heart” or “mind”), which is repeated, exhausted and stripped of its nuances and authenticity. This repetition renders the word all at once meaningless and desirable. Choi leans into this malfunctioning of seemingly unquestionable words and images that populate restless Seoul, trapped in perpetual weariness and emptiness.

The post Where the Heart Goes_Poetry Collection appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Viral Lingua

admin — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:19:42 +0000

Playing on a word-of-mouth strategy of viral marketing, Viral Lingua explores language as a vessel that transmits and mutates political ideology. The film is propelled by a performer who lip-syncs to melodramatic songs, immersed in otherworldly make-ups and hyperreal images of Korean landscapes. The lyrics adapt wordplay and self-loathing satire with wry humour, reflecting the irony of living in a society built upon the histories of colonialism and the cold war. From a Korean patriotic song lamenting an ill-fated love for a country to a children’s song set in a sci-fi dystopia, the film composes an anthem of a neo colony.

Viral Lingua (2018) was commissioned by the 2018 Busan Biennale.

The post Viral Lingua appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Wunderkammer 10.0

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 06:36:06 +0000

An operating system tries to map a city, discovering strange ruins. What purpose did these ruins serve? Who were the people who occupied these spaces? What are the objects, both real and virtual, that have served as their legacy for future cartographers? What is a tea cup, or a travel blog, if there is no one left to partake in its use? Part science fiction, part social commentary, part art installation, this short is both a mystery and a manifesto.

The post Wunderkammer 10.0 appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Melting Icecream

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 05:56:07 +0000

Melting Icecream is assumed to be a record of the 1990s democratisation movement, but the work actually began with the discovery of severely flood-damaged film. Although the work started out as a documentation of the film’s restoration process, the end product is anything but a simple record. Mixed in amongst the portrayal of the restoration process are interviews with photographers part of the so-called ‘democracy generation’; archive footage of conflict scenes in the 2000s over temporary working conditions and struggles over migrant workers; scenic shots, either devoid of people or where the individual’s identity is not revealed; videos taken beside statues with unseen faces.

The feature-length debut of photographer and art director Hong Jinhwon throws the traditional sense of documentary into disarray with his unique audio-visual arrangement.

Yoo Un-seong

The post Melting Icecream appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Dear Kimsisters in 1959

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 19:47:18 +0000

During the Cold War, The Kim Sisters went to America to make it as a pop group. They soaked in all the Asia-related images and flaunted their abilities. Director Jeon Chae-lin, who is currently studying abroad, searches out the history of other Asian women of 1959, and connects the Kim Sisters to her own story. Spanning across language and power, history and culture, she lifts up the voices of Asian women that have been silenced by men and western-centred power.

The post Dear Kimsisters in 1959 appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Dear Chaemin

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 19:33:06 +0000

In the midst of COVID-19 travel restrictions, director Bae Cyan sends a series of video letters to her younger sibling in Seoul from the Hague. Do we want a return to the ‘old normal’? The auto-fiction documentary juxtaposes contact tracing, biopolitics and crowd control within the Korean and Dutch contexts, and examines the process by which country-wide and individual surveillance practices contribute to the stigmatisation of and violence against queer communities in Seoul and Asian communities in Europe. Bae Cyan creates an archive of the early stages of the pandemic and her use of images, sound and voice is striking.

The post Dear Chaemin appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra

admin — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 17:57:16 +0000

Screening together with Cashbag (2019, 25 min)

With Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), Possession (1981) and A Ghost Story (2017) as its nearest analogues, Park Syeyoung’s experimental fungal slasher tracks a mattress, and the spores growing on it, as they pass through the hands of different owners and users, including lovers at different stages of their relationships and a terminally ill woman. As the fungus rapidly evolves and subtly apes the manners of its human hosts, it vampirically absorbs a vertebra from each to build itself into anthropomorphic form.

A melancholic, monstrous romantic horror with a very unusual take on time, this sets human dramas and dreams against a much broader, more irrational canvas of nature. Episodic and abstract, its utterly gonzo premise drifts to an ending of unexpected sadness and awe. Meanwhile Park’s (non-horror) short Cashbag, which follows a man in a series of nocturnal transactions, ends in a similar waterside location.

Anton Bitel

The post The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.

Plantarians (2017 – 2020)

admin — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 12:26:11 +0000

Plantarians (2017-2020) is a rumination on entangled relationships between humans and plants in urban areas. Divided into episodes, each follows individuals who cultivate, eat and accompany plants in celebration and grief. These everyday activities become strangely unfamiliar through unhurried attention to the moments of survival and resilience of plants between the cracks, on the peripheries of gardens and within human-made surroundings. The subtle shift in perspective elicits a sense of ambivalence, imagining how plants might endure, interact with and be vulnerable to the interruptions inflicted upon them. Plantarians poses a fundamental question around interdependent relations, both conflicting and intimate, and how we co-inhabit this planet with all living beings.

The exhibition at LUX features a collection of short films, photography and video installation that form the latest iteration of the Plantarians episodes, accompanied by a commissioned essay and related programmes.

The first iteration of Plantarians was screened at LUX in 2017. This time, the project returns to the site as an expansive body of work, marking the occasion of welcoming Heo’s films to the LUX Collection. Plantarians has been developed during Hospitalfield Summer Residency 2017; Summer Lodge Residency, Nottingham Trent University 2018; Jan van Eyck Academie Residency 2019-2020 and supported by The Elephant Trust and Arts Council Korea.

The post Plantarians (2017 – 2020) appeared first on London Korean Film Festival.