The lives of Kore­an women as seen through the eyes of female directors

In 1955, direc­tor Park Nam-ok became the first South Kore­an woman to make a fea­ture film. Yet The Wid­ow, which would prove to be her only film, did not so much blow open the door for oth­er women direc­tors as leave it slight­ly ajar.

In her rough, spir­it­ed 2002 doc­u­men­tary, Keep­ing The Vision Alive, direc­tor Yim Soon-rye met a group of female film­mak­ers who, along with var­i­ous oth­er women’s cul­tur­al move­ments, broke out in the coun­try in the mid ​’90s and man­aged, against all the odds, to change this. The film details the many obsta­cles put up by the South Kore­an film industry’s obsti­nate, oppres­sive male gate­keep­ers, deter­mined to main­tain the sta­tus quo while cel­e­brat­ing the ways in which they them­selves had man­aged to sub­vert it. Togeth­er these two films, made almost 50 years apart, made for a fit­ting intro­duc­tion to the 2016 edi­tion of the Lon­don Kore­an Film Fes­ti­val (LKFF), which took as its focus this year a nation­al sur­vey of female film­mak­ing over the last 15 years.

The best film in the ​‘Lives of Kore­an Women through the Eyes of Women Direc­tors’ strand was Jeong Jae-eun’s Take Care of My Cat, which per­formed poor­ly on its ini­tial release back in 2001 but has since gained a healthy domes­tic fol­low­ing. It del­i­cate­ly tracks the diverg­ing lives of a female friend­ship group on the cusp of adult­hood, as the young women arrive at a junc­ture where var­i­ous changes threat­en to dri­ve them apart. First time writer/​director Jae-eun moves between the sto­ries of the five girls effort­less­ly, slow­ly estab­lish­ing the evolv­ing details of their indi­vid­ual lives as well as the shared his­to­ry which con­nects them. Gor­geous­ly shot and emo­tive­ly sound­tracked by ear­ly 2000s Kore­an elec­tron­i­ca col­lec­tive byul​.org, Take Care of My Cat has a rare, arrest­ing atmos­phere; the sort of film where all of the ele­ments involved seem to come togeth­er perfectly.

Yim Soon-rye’s For­ev­er The Moment and Boo Ji-young’s Cart are two fur­ther exam­ples of the over­ar­ch­ing theme at this year’s LKFF: the strength of the female col­lec­tive. Drama­ti­sa­tions of real events, both films show a band of ordi­nary women dis­play­ing excep­tion­al com­mit­ment to a dif­fi­cult cause, often at sub­stan­tial per­son­al expense. Cart shows a coop­er­a­tive of tem­po­rary store work­ers who resist­ed the infringe­ments of their employ­ers and the state, form­ing a union and protest­ing vehe­ment­ly for the most basic rights. For­ev­er The Moment fol­lows Korea’s women’s nation­al hand­ball team as they bat­tle for Olympic glo­ry in 2004 against a back­drop of var­i­ous per­son­al and eco­nom­ic com­pli­ca­tions. These films are notable as exam­ples of women direc­tors work­ing with­in main­stream, typ­i­cal­ly male-helmed modes (the sports movie and the protest nar­ra­tive), and invert­ing these for­mats to tell stir­ring sto­ries of the pow­er of female uni­ty against oppres­sive forces or with­in lim­it­ing structures.

A dif­fer­ent sto­ry of ordi­nary women, Hyun­Ju Lee’s Our Love Sto­ry, one of the new­er fea­tures with­in the ret­ro­spec­tive, is a rare exam­ple of a gay rela­tion­ship in Kore­an cin­e­ma. Gen­tle and decid­ed­ly undra­mat­ic, Hyun­Ju Lee’s low-key indie gem explores a shy rela­tion­ship between an art stu­dent and a bar­tender, patient­ly draw­ing out the specifics of a bur­geon­ing romance while sly­ly draw­ing atten­tion to the social bar­ri­ers which com­pli­cate it at the fringes. Strong per­for­mances from leads Lee Sang-hee and Ryu Sun-young car­ry Our Love Sto­ry, with Lee’s under­stat­ed direc­tion giv­ing them plen­ty of space to flesh out a com­pelling, believ­able rela­tion­ship dra­ma that devel­ops nat­u­ral­ly with the char­ac­ters’ under­stand­ing of each other.

In one of the festival’s two forums on women’s roles in Kore­an cin­e­ma, host Sophie May­er, while out­lin­ing the impor­tance of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, sur­mised the panelist’s thoughts with the neol­o­gism ​“you can’t be what you can’t see.” If any­thing uni­fies the films in the LKFF’s mini-retro, it is this. They pose alter­na­tives to the mas­cu­line nar­ra­tives that have been, and con­tin­ue to be, cen­tral to Kore­an cin­e­ma, and show indi­vid­u­als and worlds that dif­fer from the norm. Less inspir­ing is the fact that, based on Soo-jung and Soon-rye’s com­ments dur­ing the dis­cus­sions, some 14 years on from Keep­ing The Vision Alive, much of the prob­lems the par­tic­i­pant film­mak­ers out­line seem not like descrip­tions of a bygone era, but pre­scient con­cerns still entire­ly rel­e­vant to the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion. Nam-ok’s vision remains alive, but is yet to be fulfilled.