Seoul Dispatch.

For those with the means and the interest in Women's Cinema, the last two weeks offered quite an opportunity to pursue that interest. One could have started at the quintessential Women's Cinema event, the 29th Créteil Films de Femmes which Moira Sullivan wrote about here at the Daily, and then one could have continued onward to the well-attended 9th Women's Film Festival in Seoul (WFFIS) the following weekend (April 5 through 12). I was unable to prepare as extensively for my second visit to this festival in the Shinchon district of Seoul, well-positioned between subway stops and walking jaunts from three of South Korea's more respected universities (Yonsei University, the women's university Ewha, and the art school Hongik). My contacts at the festival either failed to respond or failed to return to their posts. And the English translation of the website didn't extend this year beyond a mere introduction. Plus, due to work commitments, my time here was limited to three days rather than the preferable week-long stay.

With such restricted means, as soon as the bus dropped me off at the Shinchon Rotary, I quickly went underground to get back up again across the street towards the Artreon multiplex where the festival takes place. A quick perusal of the films available to me revealed some nice surprises and some disappointments. Concerning the latter, I wouldn't be able to make any of the four South Korean films on show. Three because they didn't fall in line with my visit (Park Jeong-suk's documentary, Lady Camellia, about a leprosy patient; Ryou Eun-jung's high school revenge film Punch Strike; and Sung Ji-hae's Before the Summer Passes Away, which I thankfully caught at Busan) and one because it was sold out (Out: Smashing Homophobia Project by Feminists Video Activism WOM, which, as you'll soon read, I'm totally bummed I couldn't attend). Still, I made the most of what I could catch.

I began the festival with three Filipina short documentaries by Ditsi Carolino and Sadhana Buxani, entitled Made in the Philippines, to Fukuoka with Love, which was here as part of the Women Migrants: Invisible People series. Although the first short about sweatshop laborers in the Philippines and their fight for justice doesn't seem to relate to the theme, it does provide the context of the reasons some Filipinas might want to leave the archipelago. The next two shorts each dealt with "JapaYuki," or "Japan Go," Filipinas who have migrated to Japan where they can make in a day more than they can make in a month back home. Despite the literal definition, the term denotes prostitutes in the vernacular, and much of the face time spent by the participants in the latter short is to squelch that stereotype.

I stumbled upon a friend of mine while looking for my assigned seat at this screening and the latter short was the primary one we spoke about amongst the Korean women defiantly smoking outside the theater. (It wasn't that long ago when women would be verbally and sometimes physically accosted when daring to smoke in public in South Korea.) The three Filipinas in the final short spend much of their time disassociating themselves from prostitutes rather than, as festivals like this intend, focusing on solidarity in their mutual plights as women and as migrants. Two of the women spend a great amount of time talking about how "in the Philippines, you'd have a maid," but in Japan they are the maids for their husbands. Along with underscoring how much of men's leisure is subsidized by women's labor, this also sets distance between these women and other Filipinas based on class, since it's only a certain privileged class that has access to expectations of acquiring maids in the Philippines, as opposed to the class which provides maid labor along with sex workers. It is the middle short that bridges the two divided by class, for this woman spends much of her leisure time with the homeless in Japan whom she identifies with because she herself feels spiritually "homeless." She connects with them because she's willing to risk identifying with them, rather than separating from them out of fear.

As the Shadow, Marina Spada's Italian feature, could have fit within the Women Migrants series as well since it follows an Italian travel agent who has a Ukrainian migrant placed in her reluctant stewardship. Instead it was the only film I caught in the New Currents section of recent outstanding features by women directors. As the Shadow was definitely my favorite of the features I caught. I tend to enjoy slower films and those that address isolation caused partly by our modern condition and this film definitely takes that direction with some well-punctuated moments of the whir and drone of the empty streets that too often surround us even in our "crowded" urban environments.

Gypo is another film that bleeds from one section into another since it contains both a Rumanian-Czech migrant character and a lesbian subplot. This film by UK director Jan Dunn was included in the Queer Rainbow series of films by women about sexual minorities. A Dogme95 film, it wasn't as compelling to me as a narrative whole, although sections of it were interesting, such as the fight at the dinner table intimately displaced before the eyes of the young immigrant.

Another film I caught in the Queer Rainbow section was the Taiwanese Spider Lilies. (The two sections from which I failed to catch representative films were the Empire and Women section, which looked at "the specific aspects of women's lives either forcibly or actively related to the globalization and the neoliberalism in the global/local context" and that featured films such as Enemies of Happiness about "Afghanistan's most famous female," Malalai Jaya, and an Iraqi women's life resulting from US occupation in My Home, Your War, and a section of youth films cheekily titled Girls on Film.) Zero Chou's film about a tectonically-traumatized tattoo artist and a webcam girl at the edge of womanhood follows in a long line of tragic love stories that I'm quite turned off by these days. (That is, unless such tragedy is internally critiqued as I find it to be in Leesong Hee-il's No Regret.) Yes, the end presents an interpretation of hope, but it seems tacked on rather than flowing from the larger themes.

Because I wasn't able to prepare for this festival as I somewhat obsessively would normally, I did attend a few screenings I'd probably not have otherwise. One of these screenings was a series of shorts from Canada, the USA, Malaysia and South Korea. Megan Martin's Ninth Street Chronicles is a littler Little Miss Sunshine, Jenn Kao's short speculates on the inside that draws us Outside, Tan Chui Mui spends a birthday all-nighter with a girl on the edge of 18 and her friend of 34 who respectfully keeps it friendly in A Tree in Tanjung Malim, and Kang Hae-yun runs a Good Girl through her melodramatic paces. The stand-out of the bunch was Tan's short. Having produced The Gravel Road and one of Amir Muhammad's films (the latter being the director I've yet to see a film by whom I most want to see a film by), Tan presents further positive signs of what we've been hearing is to come from Malaysia. It is patient for a short film with an interesting juxtaposition between the hope of youth ("Even if I fail to get where I'm going, I get to see beauty anyway") and the cynicism of age ("What the hell do you know?"). One of the nice aspects of the short I found was how Adthan, or the Muslim Call to Prayer, can serve as a diegetic clock in cinema based in Muslim countries. We can fairly assume that the characters have spent the whole night together as they wait to depart at the bus stop because behind them we hear Fajr, or the first Call to Prayer of the day that occurs before sunrise. Such underscores how our efforts to inform ourselves of the cultures, histories and politics of the films we watch can greatly enhance our viewing.

Which obviously would have enhanced the screening I attended of the only Márta Mészáros film I was able to catch. Each year WFFIS features a series of works by a single female director and Hungarian director Mészáros was this year's selection. Due to South Korean anti-communist politics in the early decades of South Korea's brief halved existence, films from the Eastern bloc countries to South Korea's West wouldn't have had many opportunities to grace cinemas here until recently. I know much more about South Korea's history than I do Hungary's, and the film I saw from 1982, Diary for My Children, required more knowledge from me as an audience member than that with which I came. The film has definitely pushed me to learn more about her (the country's and Mészáros's) history and of the world cinema references that pulse on the screens within the screen, for the main character of Diary for My Children seeks solace in the cinema from the chaos of her time in Hungary's history. Based on my friend's comments, her masterpiece from 1975, Adoption, the film for which she became the first woman to win a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, would have been a better introduction, but I passed my ticket onto this friend since she had a strong interest in the film.

I also forwent this valuable haptic opportunity to see Adoption; haptic in the sense that films touch us through our eyes, because another such opportunity was available to me. I decided to spend time with a friend in the real rather than on the screen. The events and conversations surrounding the film festival are as much a part of the experience as are the films themselves. With its Queer Cinema focus this year, there was an accompanying Queer Night event at a local basement bar. This event featured drag shows both queen and king and it was the latter that drew an attendance of fire hazard levels. Lips and hips sync-ed to Tom Jones's "Sex Bomb," an Elvis Herselvis-y side-burned and pompadour-ed Korean woman fully king-ed in a blazing red formal shirt gave the crowd exactly what they were hanging from the stair handrails for. It was quite an event and it was a pleasure to see all the shiny happy people truly enjoying the celebratory space that WIFFS provided, challenging any shorthand-ed clichés about this "conservative" country.

Yet, I won't equally shorthand South Korea as a liberal stalwart since I am also aware that I can't tell you who I might have seen at this particular party. The masks Queer Koreans still have to wear while walking throughout the everyday South Korea were placed on all of us at the screenings of this year's Documentary Ock Rang Award winner, the omnibus Out: Smashing Homophobia Project, a triptych of lesbian teens who are reconciling their sexual selves with the society that surrounds them. I would have to learn about this film from several secondhand sources since the only screening I could attend was sold out. And as much as I was bummed I couldn't attend, I was glad such a film sold out and it provided me an opportunity to vicariously soak up the joy my friends and their friends exuded and the rapid-fire takes they had on the film. My friends talked about how the one girl's mother's testimonial of love for her lesbian daughter at the end brought them to tears. (They would later be told the eye masks needed to be returned for the next screening, causing them to pity the next person who had to wear their tear-drenched ones.)

My friends would tell me about how they found the second film in this omnibus problematic because they felt the director was imposing her experience on this girl who probably has as much trouble deciding what to put on in the morning let alone who to put out to at night. And my one friend would seethe with anger at the comments from one member of the crowd that each of these girls' experiences was merely a "phase," making my friend want to scream like the young masked girls in the promotional poster. (Although, that's not really a good comparison because, well, look at how happy those girls on the poster seem to be, finding their voice in their roars atop the panoptic rooftop of South Korean sexual surveillance.) I hope a festival near me gives me a second chance to catch this film for myself (Frameline, are you listening?), but for now, I have memories of how dearly this film touched my friends and how they deeply touched me by privileging me through the moments each shared about the film.

Ironically, it's the film I didn't see that will likely stay with me the most this year due to the circumstances I fell into with this year's WIFFS. In this way, the festival didn't disappoint but continued my interest in returning again and again, just as I return again and again to the themes and ideas that all such festivals provide, as I return to the emotional embrace of my friends when our busy lives manage to synchronize regardless of the physical miles that separate us. In this way, the modern isolation I so appreciate in films such as As the Shadow is kept there on screen to learn from so as to disallow it from encroaching upon my own life outside the theater.

Posted by dwhudson at April 11, 2007 9:49 AM