Interview: "A Glaring Night" with Lee Mi-ji

Our final piece of the puzzle in our Shorts Showcase is an interview with Lee Mi-ji and her graduation film A Glaring Night. The film screened as part of the Korean Short Film Night 2012 on November 29th at Cinema On The Park, a weekly Korean film night in Sydney. 

A Glaring Night follows the story of Mike, a young Korean man adopted to an American family when he was a baby, who returns to Korea in search of his father. The film centres around one single night in Daegu, as Mike, while driving his taxi, encounters a passenger who might hold the key to finding his father.

The film previously screened at the Pucheon International Fantastic Film Festival this year in the shorts section, and was voted the Audience Favourite at the Korean Short Film Night screening at Cinema On The Park last November.

Read on for a short interview with director Lee Mi-ji and her film A Glaring Night. 

Interview: "Making Noise In Silence" with Mina Son

Continuing in our series of interviews with short filmmakers, next up is a special chat with Mina Son, whose film Making Noise in Silence was part of our International Short Film Showcase at this year's Korean Film Festival in Australia. The film had an encore showing as part of our Korean Short Film Night 2012 on September 29th. For more information, click through to Cinema On The Park's website.

Making Noise in Silence is a short documentary about two teenagers navigating the complexities of adolescence and adulthood within the duality of Deaf and Korean cultures.

The film screened at several different film festivals including the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, United Nations Association Film Festival, Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival and the San Diego Asian Film Festival where it received the Best Short Documentary prize in 2011.

Read on for a short interview with director Mina Son and her film Making Noise in Silence.

Interview: "KOWI" with Mary-Jo Tohill

As part of the upcoming Korean Short Film Night 2012 event organised by the programming team behind KOFFIA, we took this opportunity to speak with Mary-Jo Tohill, director of short documentary KOWI. The New Zealand produced film will be screened at this very special occasion on September 29th to celebrate the New Zealand and Korea Year of Friendship this 2012.

To book your free seat at the Korean Short Film Night, click through to Cinema On The Park's website.

KOWI is a documentary that follows the story of a Korean family who, after immigrating to New Zealand, put aside their struggles in a new land to help and cook for the homeless every Sunday.

Read on for a short interview with director Mary-Jo Tohill and her film KOWI. 

The Road to Action…(Via some Drama & Suspense)

The month of November saw the ‘Cinema on the Park’ screen assaulted by a barrage of fists and kicks, as four movies representing the best of old school and modern day Korean action tore up the screen. Now that the dust has settled, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the brief but invaluable insight I got into the organisation of such an event, through my involvement in screening the Australian premieres of ‘Miss, Please Be Patient’ & ‘Canton Viper’.

The initial seed for Action Month was planted way back in January this year, when after a three year hiatus living in Tokyo, which saw me visiting Korea several times, I returned to Sydney and purely by accident stumbled across the Korean Culture Office. I discovered the Cinema on the Park program almost immediately, and set about finding a way to contribute my own love of Korean movies through another one of my passions – writing.

Somewhere along the way though, I couldn’t get it out of my mind of what an opportunity it would be to showcase a part of Korean cinema history that is overlooked, and in many cases completely unheard of, by most people – the kung-fu movie genre of the 70s and 80s. Indeed the genre itself is almost a forgotten one in the history of Korean cinema, as while countless Korean super-kickers lit up the screens in Hong Kong kung-fu movies, movies produced on home soil were often lacking in budget, quality chorography, and basically every other ingredient that makes a kung-fu movie enjoyable.

For that reason the whole genre of Korean kung-fu is usually completely ignored, or even worse, passed off as an unwatchable mess. Such an attitude makes this small part of Korean cinema an incredibly murky area to find out information on, indeed even Hong Kong movies that were made on the cheap in the Philippines gain more recognition than their Korean counterparts. Even now, an unknown amount of movies during the late 70’s / early 80’s were in fact Hong Kong / Korean co-productions, but a check on the internet usually has them only listed as purely Hong Kong productions, with the Korean input not mentioned, or more likely, not even known about.

Action Month Review: Action Boys / 우린 액션배우다 (2008)

After watching the high kicking heroes of the previous three weeks movies, the final week of action month couldn’t have finished with a more appropriate choice than the 2008 documentary ‘Action Boys’.

Made on a shoestring budget, the documentary chronicles a five year period, from 2004 – 2008. Beginning with the thirty-six students that make up Seoul Action School’s class of 2004, thanks to the grueling training regime, by the time of graduation only eight of them remain. If anyone wants to check out the Action School in more depth, I did a blog post of my visit there. It’s not long before even some of the eight that remain decide that perhaps the faceless world of stunt work is not for them, and the documentary eventually settles its focus on four of the graduates and their adventures, or often mis-adventures, into the movie industry.