UCLA Film & Television Archive, in association with the Korean Film Council and UCLA Center for Korean Studies, will be premiering films of South Korean writer-director Jeon Soo-il on selected dates from January 15-24 at the The Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024 (corner of Wilshire & Westwood Blvds.). Please see below for more information and contact Kelly Graml at kgraml@ucla.edu with any questions.
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Jeon Soo-il will appear in person on Saturday, January 16. Please find complete program info below, and here: http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/calendar/calendardetails.aspx?details_type=2&id=369
JOURNEYS AND ARRIVALS: THE FILMS OF JEON SOO-IL
Friday, January 15 – Sunday, January 24
“Perhaps cinema is the process of translating your inner self on film? Or perhaps it’s a way of pursuing a different way of life.” —Jeon Soo-il.
Over the last decade, South Korean writer-director Jeon Soo-il has built a solid reputation on the international festival circuit for highly personal films that explore the connections between identity and geography, art and being. Born in 1959 and having studied film in both Pusan and Paris, Jeon is drawn to characters who find themselves unmoored from the spaces and relationships that defined their lives and who embark on journeys, both inward and outward, their final destinations always unknown. Championing a powerfully minimalist style that can border on documentary, Jeon has charted his own course in South Korean cinema, dividing his time between teaching film at Kyungsung University, where he’s an associate professor, and making them. As Jeon re-approaches certain locations, motifs and characters from film to film, his work reveals itself as Jeon’s own personal journey. The UCLA Film & Television Archive is pleased to be able to present Jeon’s first six features to Los Angeles audiences for the first time.
IN PERSON: Jeon Soo-il (Saturday, January 16).
Presented in association with the Korean Film Council and the UCLA Center for Korean Studies.
Friday, January 15
7:30 p.m.
HIMALAYA: WHERE THE WIND DWELLS
South Korea, 2008
PROD: Kim Dong-joo, Jeon Soo-il. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Kim Sung-tai. EDIT: Roh Bong-seo, Kim In-soo. CAST: Choi Min-sik, Tsering Kipale Gurung, Tenjing Sherpa.
Choi Min-sik, star of Chan-wook Park’s international cult hits Oldboy (2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), brings his simmering intensity to Jeon’s Himalaya: The Place Wind Dwells as Choi, a South Korean businessman embarked on an unexpected journey of self-discovery. Separated by work from his own wife and child who are living in the United States, Choi must deliver the ashes of an illegal Nepalese worker killed in his brother’s factory to the worker’s wife and young son residing high in the Himalayas. Choi’s physically grueling trek to their remote village prepares him for a quasi-spiritual experience—just as long as he remains silent about the reality that brought him there. Amid the film’s elemental backdrop, Jeon strips the story down to its essentials opening up a powerful almost documentary sense of place that underscores the experience of globalization as a pervasive feeling of dislocation.
35mm; color; in Korean, English and Nepali with English subtitles; 95 min.
TIME BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF
South Korea, 2005
PROD: Cho In-sook. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Jung Sung-wook. EDIT: Le Dong-wook. CAST: Kim Sung-jai, An Kil-kang.
Everyone is searching for something or someone in Jeon’s powerfully muted exploration of the social, economic and national divisions that mark contemporary South Korea and its history. Film director Kim (a character who previously appeared in Jeon’s second feature The Bird Who Stops in the Air, played here by An Kil-kang) takes time off from a long foundering film project to visit his cousin and aunt in his northern hometown and to accompany them on a journey across the border to visit a long-lost family member. When North Korean officials suddenly cancel the reunion, Kim lingers in town, attracted to a woman who’s also looking for a missing family member. The film’s spare dialogue and ambiguous encounters—not to mention copious scenes of drunkenness—recall the work of Hong Sang-soo. But Jeon pushes Kim well beyond the middle-class environs where Hong’s urbanites play out their personal dramas into starkly drawn, social realist terrain where place and politics come to the fore.
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 110 min.
Saturday, January 16
7:30 p.m.
WITH A GIRL OF BLACK SOIL
South Korea, 2007
PROD: Jo In-sook. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il, Jung Soon-yeoung. CINE: Kim Sung-tai. EDIT: Seo Yong-duk. CAST: Ryu Yeon-mi, Jo Young-jin, Park Hyung-woo.
Two recent, well-received films from South Korea, So Young-kim’s Treeless Mountain (2008) and Ounie Lecomte’s A Brand New Life (2009), feature stories about children who have been abandoned or put up for adoption by parents wracked by personal and financial troubles. In With a Girl of Black Soil, director Jeon zeroes in on the equally poignant trials of a child who remains with her family as it collapses around her. Years after her mother left, 8-year-old Young-lim must watch as her father retreats into an alcoholic oblivion after a case of black lung costs him his job as a coal miner. As the responsibility for caring for her dad, elderly grandfather and her developmentally-disabled younger brother increasingly falls to her, Young-lim struggles with decisions beyond her years. Shooting in the rugged, mountainous Kangwon province, Jeon firmly fixes Young-lim and her father in their social context while avoiding heavy-handed appeals for sympathy. As Young-lim, Yu Yun-mi delivers a heartbreaking turn that The Hollywood Reporter declared, “emphatically deserves a place in the pantheon of great child performances.”
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 89 min.
IN PERSON: Jeon Soo-il.
Sunday, January 17
7 p.m.
MY RIGHT TO RAVAGE MYSELF
South Korea, 2003
PROD: Regis Ghezelbash. Based on the novel by Kim Young-ha. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Kim Sung-tai. EDIT: Seo yong-duk. CAST: Jung Bo-suk, Lee Soo-a, Choo Sang-mi, Jang Hyun-sung, Kim Young-min.
English-speaking audiences might feel a bit led astray by the suggestiveness of the English title for Jeon’s big screen adaptation of respected South Korean author Kim Young-ha’s first novel, better translated for its English-language publication as My Right to Destroy Myself. While a distinctly erotic undercurrent runs just beneath the film’s sleek surfaces, its interwoven stories revolve around an aspiring novelist whose day job involves helping people execute the perfect suicide. “S,” as he’s known, describes himself as a “suicide designer.” Part therapist, part Svengali, he advises his clients not only on the best methods but also the most appropriate aesthetic touches for their own personalized final exit. A troubled hostess, a successful performance artist and the pair of brothers they’re involved with, each find their lives drawn into S’s seductive orbit by promises of something better than a life with dignity: a death with style. In adapting Kim’s novel, which has been compared to the work of Milan Kundera, Bret Easton Ellis and Haruki Murakami, Jeon expands his own themes of loneliness and isolation within South Korea’s increasingly consumerist society.
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 93 min.
Sunday, January 24
7 p.m.
THE BIRD WHO STOPS IN THE AIR
South Korea, 1999
PROD: Jeon Soo-il, Jo In-suk. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Hwang Chul-hyun, Kim Dae-seon. EDIT: Park Gok-ji. CAST: Seol Kyung-gu, Kim So-hee.
The title of Jean Soo-il’s second feature evokes the boundaries that separate states of being between movement and stillness, representation and reality, life and death. At the film’s center, a film professor struggles with a career and personal life that have come to a halt, stranded between the past and the future, his family and his lover, his last film project and his next. Like the two sides of Pusan’s as yet unfinished Gwangan Bridge, which becomes a recurring metaphor in the film, Professor Kim (who reappears as a character in Time Between Dog and Wolf) remains disconnected from himself. The key to breaking out of this sorry state seems to be his childhood dreams of birds which he struggles to recreate on film. At one point, Kim’s lover observes of a flock of birds taking wing, “it’s amazing how they don’t collide with one another.” Jeon suffuses The Bird Who Stops in the Air with a sense of melancholy and loneliness as his characters struggle to make any kind of meaningful connection at all, with themselves and one another.
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 106 min.
WIND ECHOING IN MY BEING
South Korea, 1997
PROD/DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Hwang Chul-hyun. EDIT: Park Gok Ji. CAST: Lee Choong-in, Cho Jae-hyun, You Soon-chul.
Jeon’s debut feature plays as a three-part philosophical and allegorical meditation on the nature of time. The triptych structure presents the stages of a man’s life, from childhood to adulthood to old age, with each section interconnected but also standing on its own. (Indeed, the middle section, “The Young: Wind Echoing in My Being,” shot in black and white, premiered as a 40-minute short in the “Un Certain Regard” section of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.) In addition to Jeon’s exploration of time as both an abstract and concrete experience, many of the themes and motifs that come to the fore in his later films appear here in a free floating, gestational form across the three sections—loneliness and memory; art as a means of self-exploration and discovery; and the symbolic resonance of Sokcho, his hometown near the border with North Korea.
35mm, color and b/w, in Korean with English subtitles, 103 min.
--------------
VENUE: The Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024 (corner of Wilshire & Westwood Blvds.).
TICKETS: Advance tickets for other programs at the Billy Wilder Theater are available for $10 at www.cinema.ucla.edu. Tickets are also available at the Billy Wilder Theater box office starting one hour before showtime: $9, general admission; $8, students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Association members with ID.
PARKING: After 6 p.m., $3 in the lot under the Billy Wilder Theater. Enter from Westwood Blvd., just north of Wilshire.
INFO: www.cinema.ucla.edu / 310.206.FILM
Jeon Soo-il will appear in person on Saturday, January 16. Please find complete program info below, and here: http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/calendar/calendardetails.aspx?details_type=2&id=369
JOURNEYS AND ARRIVALS: THE FILMS OF JEON SOO-IL
Friday, January 15 – Sunday, January 24
“Perhaps cinema is the process of translating your inner self on film? Or perhaps it’s a way of pursuing a different way of life.” —Jeon Soo-il.
Over the last decade, South Korean writer-director Jeon Soo-il has built a solid reputation on the international festival circuit for highly personal films that explore the connections between identity and geography, art and being. Born in 1959 and having studied film in both Pusan and Paris, Jeon is drawn to characters who find themselves unmoored from the spaces and relationships that defined their lives and who embark on journeys, both inward and outward, their final destinations always unknown. Championing a powerfully minimalist style that can border on documentary, Jeon has charted his own course in South Korean cinema, dividing his time between teaching film at Kyungsung University, where he’s an associate professor, and making them. As Jeon re-approaches certain locations, motifs and characters from film to film, his work reveals itself as Jeon’s own personal journey. The UCLA Film & Television Archive is pleased to be able to present Jeon’s first six features to Los Angeles audiences for the first time.
IN PERSON: Jeon Soo-il (Saturday, January 16).
Presented in association with the Korean Film Council and the UCLA Center for Korean Studies.
Friday, January 15
7:30 p.m.
HIMALAYA: WHERE THE WIND DWELLS
South Korea, 2008
PROD: Kim Dong-joo, Jeon Soo-il. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Kim Sung-tai. EDIT: Roh Bong-seo, Kim In-soo. CAST: Choi Min-sik, Tsering Kipale Gurung, Tenjing Sherpa.
Choi Min-sik, star of Chan-wook Park’s international cult hits Oldboy (2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), brings his simmering intensity to Jeon’s Himalaya: The Place Wind Dwells as Choi, a South Korean businessman embarked on an unexpected journey of self-discovery. Separated by work from his own wife and child who are living in the United States, Choi must deliver the ashes of an illegal Nepalese worker killed in his brother’s factory to the worker’s wife and young son residing high in the Himalayas. Choi’s physically grueling trek to their remote village prepares him for a quasi-spiritual experience—just as long as he remains silent about the reality that brought him there. Amid the film’s elemental backdrop, Jeon strips the story down to its essentials opening up a powerful almost documentary sense of place that underscores the experience of globalization as a pervasive feeling of dislocation.
35mm; color; in Korean, English and Nepali with English subtitles; 95 min.
TIME BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF
South Korea, 2005
PROD: Cho In-sook. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Jung Sung-wook. EDIT: Le Dong-wook. CAST: Kim Sung-jai, An Kil-kang.
Everyone is searching for something or someone in Jeon’s powerfully muted exploration of the social, economic and national divisions that mark contemporary South Korea and its history. Film director Kim (a character who previously appeared in Jeon’s second feature The Bird Who Stops in the Air, played here by An Kil-kang) takes time off from a long foundering film project to visit his cousin and aunt in his northern hometown and to accompany them on a journey across the border to visit a long-lost family member. When North Korean officials suddenly cancel the reunion, Kim lingers in town, attracted to a woman who’s also looking for a missing family member. The film’s spare dialogue and ambiguous encounters—not to mention copious scenes of drunkenness—recall the work of Hong Sang-soo. But Jeon pushes Kim well beyond the middle-class environs where Hong’s urbanites play out their personal dramas into starkly drawn, social realist terrain where place and politics come to the fore.
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 110 min.
Saturday, January 16
7:30 p.m.
WITH A GIRL OF BLACK SOIL
South Korea, 2007
PROD: Jo In-sook. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il, Jung Soon-yeoung. CINE: Kim Sung-tai. EDIT: Seo Yong-duk. CAST: Ryu Yeon-mi, Jo Young-jin, Park Hyung-woo.
Two recent, well-received films from South Korea, So Young-kim’s Treeless Mountain (2008) and Ounie Lecomte’s A Brand New Life (2009), feature stories about children who have been abandoned or put up for adoption by parents wracked by personal and financial troubles. In With a Girl of Black Soil, director Jeon zeroes in on the equally poignant trials of a child who remains with her family as it collapses around her. Years after her mother left, 8-year-old Young-lim must watch as her father retreats into an alcoholic oblivion after a case of black lung costs him his job as a coal miner. As the responsibility for caring for her dad, elderly grandfather and her developmentally-disabled younger brother increasingly falls to her, Young-lim struggles with decisions beyond her years. Shooting in the rugged, mountainous Kangwon province, Jeon firmly fixes Young-lim and her father in their social context while avoiding heavy-handed appeals for sympathy. As Young-lim, Yu Yun-mi delivers a heartbreaking turn that The Hollywood Reporter declared, “emphatically deserves a place in the pantheon of great child performances.”
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 89 min.
IN PERSON: Jeon Soo-il.
Sunday, January 17
7 p.m.
MY RIGHT TO RAVAGE MYSELF
South Korea, 2003
PROD: Regis Ghezelbash. Based on the novel by Kim Young-ha. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Kim Sung-tai. EDIT: Seo yong-duk. CAST: Jung Bo-suk, Lee Soo-a, Choo Sang-mi, Jang Hyun-sung, Kim Young-min.
English-speaking audiences might feel a bit led astray by the suggestiveness of the English title for Jeon’s big screen adaptation of respected South Korean author Kim Young-ha’s first novel, better translated for its English-language publication as My Right to Destroy Myself. While a distinctly erotic undercurrent runs just beneath the film’s sleek surfaces, its interwoven stories revolve around an aspiring novelist whose day job involves helping people execute the perfect suicide. “S,” as he’s known, describes himself as a “suicide designer.” Part therapist, part Svengali, he advises his clients not only on the best methods but also the most appropriate aesthetic touches for their own personalized final exit. A troubled hostess, a successful performance artist and the pair of brothers they’re involved with, each find their lives drawn into S’s seductive orbit by promises of something better than a life with dignity: a death with style. In adapting Kim’s novel, which has been compared to the work of Milan Kundera, Bret Easton Ellis and Haruki Murakami, Jeon expands his own themes of loneliness and isolation within South Korea’s increasingly consumerist society.
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 93 min.
Sunday, January 24
7 p.m.
THE BIRD WHO STOPS IN THE AIR
South Korea, 1999
PROD: Jeon Soo-il, Jo In-suk. DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Hwang Chul-hyun, Kim Dae-seon. EDIT: Park Gok-ji. CAST: Seol Kyung-gu, Kim So-hee.
The title of Jean Soo-il’s second feature evokes the boundaries that separate states of being between movement and stillness, representation and reality, life and death. At the film’s center, a film professor struggles with a career and personal life that have come to a halt, stranded between the past and the future, his family and his lover, his last film project and his next. Like the two sides of Pusan’s as yet unfinished Gwangan Bridge, which becomes a recurring metaphor in the film, Professor Kim (who reappears as a character in Time Between Dog and Wolf) remains disconnected from himself. The key to breaking out of this sorry state seems to be his childhood dreams of birds which he struggles to recreate on film. At one point, Kim’s lover observes of a flock of birds taking wing, “it’s amazing how they don’t collide with one another.” Jeon suffuses The Bird Who Stops in the Air with a sense of melancholy and loneliness as his characters struggle to make any kind of meaningful connection at all, with themselves and one another.
35mm, color, in Korean with English subtitles, 106 min.
WIND ECHOING IN MY BEING
South Korea, 1997
PROD/DIR/SCR: Jeon Soo-il. CINE: Hwang Chul-hyun. EDIT: Park Gok Ji. CAST: Lee Choong-in, Cho Jae-hyun, You Soon-chul.
Jeon’s debut feature plays as a three-part philosophical and allegorical meditation on the nature of time. The triptych structure presents the stages of a man’s life, from childhood to adulthood to old age, with each section interconnected but also standing on its own. (Indeed, the middle section, “The Young: Wind Echoing in My Being,” shot in black and white, premiered as a 40-minute short in the “Un Certain Regard” section of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.) In addition to Jeon’s exploration of time as both an abstract and concrete experience, many of the themes and motifs that come to the fore in his later films appear here in a free floating, gestational form across the three sections—loneliness and memory; art as a means of self-exploration and discovery; and the symbolic resonance of Sokcho, his hometown near the border with North Korea.
35mm, color and b/w, in Korean with English subtitles, 103 min.
--------------
VENUE: The Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024 (corner of Wilshire & Westwood Blvds.).
TICKETS: Advance tickets for other programs at the Billy Wilder Theater are available for $10 at www.cinema.ucla.edu. Tickets are also available at the Billy Wilder Theater box office starting one hour before showtime: $9, general admission; $8, students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Association members with ID.
PARKING: After 6 p.m., $3 in the lot under the Billy Wilder Theater. Enter from Westwood Blvd., just north of Wilshire.
INFO: www.cinema.ucla.edu / 310.206.FILM
