This year, the London Korean Film Festival presents three documentaries. Kim Dong-won’s newest work, The 2nd Repatriation (2022), premiered at the Jeonju International Film Festival this year, and is the follow-up to Repatriation (2003, shown at the LKFF in 2018), which examined the lives of ‘un-converted’ long term political prisoners repatriated to North Korea in 2000 following an agreement between the North and the South. In the sequel, Kim Dong-won focuses instead on those who ‘converted’ under torture, oppression, and appeasement, and thus whose names did not make the list for repatriation, but who have insisted their conversions were invalid. Kim Dong-won first met the long-term prisoners and began capturing their lives on camera in 1992, the year after PURN Productions was established. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Repatriation and The 2nd Repatriation (of whose filming several of PURN Productions documentarists participated in) are the 21st-century’s most important and monumental works of Korean film. Queer identity and culture is no longer an unfamiliar topic within Korean documentary. Lee Il-ha’s I Am More (2021), which covers the life of drag artist Mo Jimin, premiered at the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, and was released this year to positive responses from both critics and audiences. The documentary makes abundant use of the style of advertisements and music videos as well as online video content, a style which suits the somewhat fantastic nature of the time-and-space ‘performance stage’ that carries so much weight in the protagonist’s life. Photographer Jinhwon Hong’s first film, Melting Icecream (2021), is assumed to be a record of Korea’s democratisation movement, but the work in fact began with the discovery of film severely damaged by flooding. Hong, who carries the unique methodology of his experimentation in photography across into film, approaches activism from a critical standpoint, and reimagines it by joining the flow of alternative Korean documentary.

These works predict the outlook of contemporary Korean documentary, in which participatory activism, mainstream style, and experimentation within the contemporary art world intersect in the absence of hierarchy. Though it is true that due to the ongoing pandemic, the situation surrounding documentary production and distribution has worsened, numbers of films have still drawn in considerable audiences upon release regardless. We must focus on the fact that the works of women documentary makers, such as Byun Gyu-ri’s Coming to You (screening this year in a different section of the LKFF), are noticeably reconfiguring the terrain of Korean documentary.

Yoo Un-Seong

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In this, his third documentary film, Lee Il-ha appears to have met a protagonist who fully resonates with his own style: Mo Jimin, queer drag artist who majored in ballet at art school. I Am More is as much Mo Jimin’s film as it is Lee Il-ha’s. The stage name More, or ‘Mo-uh (毛魚)’, meaning ‘hairy fish’, is also the title of Mo Jimin’s essay collection published at the beginning of this year. Lee Il-ha has consistently focused his interest on those who have been captured by the idea of ‘life as a stage’. The stage is a boxing ring (A Crybaby Boxing Club, 2014), as well as a road upon which ‘counter’-protest against peddlers of hate speech unfolds (Counters, 2017). Unbound by the conventions of documentary-based objectivity, Lee Il-ha’s style maximises the fantastical nature of the concept of ‘life as a stage’ that has captured I Am More’s protagonist.

Yoo Un-seong

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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

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Yoo Un-seong

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Hangyeol and Yejun’s mothers become members of the ‘Queer Children’s Parents Club’, and give themselves new names: ‘Nabi’ and ‘Vivian’. Recording the journey to change that began here, Coming to You is a documentary shot through a supportive gaze. In 2016 director Byun Gyu-ri – member of PINKS, a group that produces films for the culture and rights of sexual minorities – made a promotional video for the Queer Children’s Parents Club, of which Coming to You was an outcome.

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This selection focuses on one of the driving forces of documentary filmmaking, the urge to document and preserve stories. By making films about these subjects, filmmakers give significance to the narratives they must tell, and share them with the world through a medium that only serves to foster ideas around the building of truth. The memories revealed in this programme are often fragmentary and episodic. Their patient unfolding is often shown through ordinary people going about their lives, as they recount their tales. The contrast between current daily life and their own memories contextualises the life stories and inserts them into Korea’s recent history.

Beginning the journey at Birkbeck Cinema, we will be presenting Under Construction (Jang Yun-mi, 2018) a piece that follows the routine of construction worker Sudeok that gradually plunges into the physical, emotional and mental impact of his forty-year career. As the filmmaker-subject relationship soon reveals itself to also be a daughter-father one, so the narrative progresses from an open exploration to an intimate portrait.

This leads us into the core section of this season, formed by Halmoni (Daniel Kim, 2017), Soup and Ideology (Yang Yonghi, 2021) and With or Without You (Park Hyuck-jee, 2015), which closes in on a personal level of lived experiences. These three films, screened at the Korean Cultural Centre, will focus on the legacies, loves and losses of elder women through the sharing of their memories with the filmmakers.

In an exploration of family ties, their lived trials and joys, the collective and the individual run parallel to each other to create a series focused on how the memories of a few contribute to the stories of many. In both Halmoni and Soup and Ideology, a further level of closeness is added due to the personal ties of the filmmaker to their subject, giving the audience even more of an insight into their lives than they otherwise would have been shown.

Following these films, With or Without You is more observant, showing us the strength of the bond between two women living together who, despite not being biologically related, reinvent the traditional meaning of family. In a similar method to Halmoni and Soup and Ideology, the filmmaker indulges the audience in the daily domestics of these women, which presents relationships, characters, and their lived experiences, giving fresh perspectives on the bonds that have grown out of what has happened in their lives.

It is through the vehicle of memory that this series of films finds its ground, the sharing of experiences which contributes to an oral history of a nation. In bringing them to one season, we hope to piece the fragments together to form a collage image of a national past. The closing film, Factory Complex (Im Heung-soon, 2014), presents the stories of many who suffered in the textile and technology industry, bringing us full circle to the struggle of workers, as these women share similar experiences to those of the protagonist of Under Construction.

Traditional formats of historical writing and accepted historical fact do not always prioritise spoken testimonies, but it is in this respect that these documentary films are able to present stories that other modes cannot. From this series of films emerges the undervalued labours of women and workers, whether physical or emotional, often ignored throughout history. It is through their memories and their day-to-day lives that we can discover and rebuild a collective memory. Their experiences have an impact, their testimonies are Living Memories that we wish to share and preserve.

Robyn Minshall, Amina Ferley Yael, Roberto Oggiano & Paula Maguire

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Following on from director Im Heung-soon’s Jeju Prayer (2012), Factory Complex continues the director’s work with memories of overlooked trauma as a way of presenting alternative narratives of the injustice done to ordinary people. Im Heung-Soon’s mastery of providing a voice to the marginalised with careful, poetic handling of the presentation of these memories is truly realised in this piece.

Robyn Minshall

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Roberto Oggiano

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