Part of our Spring KFN season celebrating short film innovators.

Yi Ok-seop is the writer/director of a number of short films (starting with her 2010 debut Please Find My Mum), and of the feature Maggie (2018), which screened at the BFI London Film Festival. Koo Kyo-hwan is an actor who in 2013 debuted as writer/director on the shorts Where Is My DVD? and Welcome To My Home – in which he also starred. In 2014, Koo would take a lead role in Yi’s short A Dangerous Woman, and so began a long and fertile creative collaboration which lasts to this day. Koo has headlined as an actor in nearly all Yi’s subsequent work, as well as co-writing and co- directing her shorts Love Docu (2015), Fly To The Sky (2015) and Girls On Top (2017), and co- writing Maggie. Much of their work is collected on a shared YouTube channel, from which we have selected three of their short films that come with good English subtitles.

You can watch all of the below films on Yi Ok-seop & Koo Kyo-hwan’s YouTube channel here. When viewing use the CC button for English subtitles.

Where Is My DVD

They say ‘Write what you know’, and in Koo’s directorial debut Where Is My DVD? there would appear to be an obvious element of the autobiographical, even if that is constantly subverted by a strong streak of the absurd. Here the quest of actor Gi-hwan (Koo) to retrieve disk copies of all his previous films is at once a nostalgic trip down memory lane, a methodical confrontation with past colleagues and formative experiences, a wry metacinematic odyssey through the ambitions, pretensions and disappointments of Korea’s indie filmmaking scene, and a preparation for his latest role. Along the way, there is a recurring fixation with oral hygiene – and it all culminates in a coda (presented as a DVD’s ‘special feature’) in which the (semi-)fictive Gi-hwan receives unwitting encouragement from none other than Korea’s most successful writer/director, Bong Joon-ho.

Watch Where Is My DVD? here

A Dangerous Woman

Yi’s A Dangerous Woman is a love triangle. Fine arts student Bo-kyung (Kim Kkot Bi) has been going out for four years with Duk-woo (Koo), but while their relationship is comfortable, she feels it has long since lost its heat and become suffocating (a metaphor that in one sequence will become literalised) – so she has strayed to fellow artist Soo Jang (Baek Soo Jang), and now finds herself caught between them, leaving her life as dysfunctional as the second-hand fan that she has recently acquired. It is a funny, breezy portrait of a compromised woman, plus a cabbie who rejects his assigned part as an incidental character, and some very smart intermixing of diegetic and non-diegetic music to underscore Bo- kyung’s heartbreak.

Watch A Dangerous Woman here

Girls On Top

The much shorter, much more surreal Girls On Top concerns a circus performer (Lee Joo-young) who has recently quit aerial acrobatics for unicycling, her friend (Chun Woo-hee) who has had to abandon a beloved cactus that has outgrown her apartment, and the gravity-defying solidarity that these two women show each other as they face change together.

Watch Girls On Top here

Anton Bitel is a part-time Classicist and freelance film critic, contributing regularly to (among others) Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and VODzilla.co. He is a programmer for the London Korean Film Festival.

For our Spring edition of Korean Film Nights, we present short films from two innovative YouTube channels. In the era of Coronavirus we have witnessed the film industry shifting online, and these offerings showcase the rising stars who have continued to draw audiences of thousands to view their imaginative, dramatic and artistic works.

Our first selection is from YouTube channel Salon De 0.5 F (Underground Salon). We will shortly be hosting an online event with talented directors Kim Soy and Kim Kkobbi, stay tuned for details on what promises to be an insightful talk. When viewing our short film selections on YouTube use the CC button for English subtitles.

And So Again Today: Four short films from the Underground Salon

And So Again Today is the collective title for a compilation of four Korean short films, all directed by actors, and all posted on the YouTube channel Salon De 0.5 F (Underground Salon) in 2020. In a sense those are the only formal connections between the films but, perhaps in reflection of the filmmakers’ ages, they are also linked thematically by a preoccupation with the surrender to (or retreat from) adulthood.

My wife has gained weight, Ryu Deok-hwan

In Ryu Deok-hwan’s My wife has gained weight, after a husband (Kim Tae-hun) carefully observes his wife (Jang Young-nam) after she expresses anxiety over how much weight she is putting on, he diagnoses her ‘problem’ as being mostly the effects of maternal devotion and finds a way to share the burden of both her dutiful eating and her new exercise regime. It is a tender portrait of a couple attentive to their family’s needs, and together accepting, even embracing, the changes that come with parenthood and middle age.

Watch My Wife Has Gained Weight here

My Eggs, Kim Soy

Kim Soy’s My Eggs begins with its filmmaking protagonist Sujin (played by the director herself) being reminded how close her screenplays are to her life, and then follows her reluctant journey, at the insistence of her mother (Ahn Min-yeong), to get her ova frozen, even though she does not want children of her own. It is a playful tale of an eccentric woman made aware that her biological clock is ticking, and struggling to live her own life despite the expectations of others. Sujin’s confidante is her own egg (voiced by Lee Min-ji), which talks to her from within her ovary – but Sujin’s real children are indie films just like My Eggs, even as it is strongly implied that this script too is autobiographical.

Watch My Eggs here

Season of the Next Steps, Heo Joon-seok

There ought to be little in common between Ryoo Seung-wan’s ultraviolent action film The City of Violence (2006) and Heo Joon-seok’s gentle short Season of the Next Steps, but in fact both begin with a premise lifted straight out of Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983): old friends reunite in adulthood after one of them has died. In Heo’s film, disgruntled office worker Kuk-hee (Kim Kuk-hee) returns from the city to her former country town for a funeral. There she learns that, unlike herself, her old bandmates Sa-bong (Yoon Sa-bong) and Jae-yoon (Yoon Je-yoon) have clung to their rebellious countercultural ways, and that perhaps she too could do with rediscovering the spirit of her lost childhood.

Watch Season Of The Next Steps here

Do you like camping?, Kim Kkobbi

My personal favourite of the four is Kim Kkobbi’s Do you like camping? (aka Aimez-vous camping), in which a motorcyclist (played by Kim), camping by the windy sea, spurns a hipsterish male fellow camper’s attentions while herself fixating on a female camper (Yozoh) who is more her speed. As everyone vies to have – and to be seen having – an authentic camping experience, posturing pretensions are exposed to the elements. Wryly observed, and never quite going where expected, this is an off- season, off-kilter delight, subverting everything including its own gestures towards romance.

Watch Do You Like Camping? here

Anton Bitel is a part-time Classicist and freelance film critic, contributing regularly to (among others) Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and VODzilla.co. He is a programmer for the London Korean Film Festival.