Interview. Gina Kim.

"A compelling cross-cultural love story that sneakily blends elements of Lifetime-style domestic melodrama and ambiguous art-house cinema, Gina Kim's Never Forever is one of the spring season's unlikeliest and most delectable surprises," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

Cathleen Rountree sat down with the vivacious and sophisticated Gina Kim to talk about the history of recent Korean Cinema, her stint at Harvard, where she finds herself in her characters and her upcoming documentary. Never Forever is opening in New York and San Francisco before rolling out in May.

Updated through 4/12.

"Throughout the film your gaze is riveted to [Vera] Farmiga's stricken eyes," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Blindingly blue, expressing varying shades of panic, desire and refusal to feel, they signal the desperation of a woman who is driven to solve everyone's problems at the risk of personal catastrophe. You might describe her character, Sophie, as the square version of Irene, the drug addict Ms Farmiga played in the 2004 movie Down to the Bone. That film catapulted her into Martin Scorsese's Departed, in which her talents were conspicuously wasted."

"The fearless, frequently nude Farmiga conveys the awakening of passion in a spectrum of small, subtle shadings; among other virtues - including Matthew Clark's rapt camerawork - the movie has some of the hottest, most precisely modulated sex scenes since A History of Violence," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

Update, 4/12: "What could have been soap opera is instead thoughtfully and subtly presented by Kim, a bold storyteller who drew notice with a festival favorite, Invisible Light, in 2004," writes G Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Korean-born, New York-based and a former Harvard professor to boot, Kim is a filmmaker who shouldn't just be on the rise but shooting through the film world's glass ceiling."

Posted by dwhudson at April 11, 2008 12:34 AM