So Yong Kim

Quote:
The most intriguingly circumscribed romance of the year, In Between Days locates two Korean teens at a precarious point in their relationship. Director So Yong Kim deliberately shuns cultural specificity, keeping her camera tight around Aimie (Jiseon Kim), a recent immigrant from Korea, in order to stress the sense of suffocating remove that might affect a lonely young person living within the walls of a foreign city’s Koreatown. The director’s experiment in non-description can be frustrating (where are we? United States? Canada?), but it is also very poetic and humane (totally Dardennian), getting as it does to the core of the pain that comes with cultural assimilation. In Between Days is also an oddly gripping show of sexual one-upmanship, and something of a fuck-you to reprocessed cheese like When Harry Met Sally that passes for an authentic depiction of the way genders relate to one another. Read More »

Quote:
What is the nature of childhood resilience? Sisters Jin and Bin, ages 6 and 3, live with their mother. Jin likes school and does well. One day, their mother leaves the girls with their father’s sister, a woman they do not know. The mother seeks a reconciliation with their father. She leaves them a plastic piggy bank, promising to return when the bank is full. The girls scrub and clean for their aunt, a tippler who’s often cranky and complaining. She gives them a few coins for their work. They earn more money catching, grilling, and selling grasshoppers. They miss their mother. The bank fills. They watch for her from a mound of dirt. Will she return? Will stoic faces give way to a smile?Read More »

“artdaily.org” wrote:
These two filmmakers belong to the same generation, and share an aesthetic approach and sense of humour and intimacy. Their correspondence produced an epistolary exchange that employs a minimalism of gesture and motif to follow the lives of the two filmmakers for a whole year.
Letters
1. July 26, 2010 (Eimbcke)Read More »