Korean sex workers faced virus tracking, forced confinement, treatment — years before COVID

By VICTORIA KIM, MARCUS YAM

OCT. 10, 2020 2 AM PT

DONGDUCHEON, South Korea — The story had been brewing in her for years — a tale of disease, isolation and a state’s control over women’s bodies during a troubling chapter in South Korea’s not-so-distant past.

Gina Kim’s virtual reality film will immerse viewers in the life of a “camp town” prostitute catering to U.S. troops stationed in the country in the 1970s. The narrative will focus on a day her character spends locked in a government-run treatment center, being pumped with antibiotics for a suspected case of venereal disease.

Kim, a film professor at UCLA, hadn’t planned on shooting at a time when much of what her protagonist experienced — rudimentary contact tracing, stigmatization from infection, quarantine and government control over citizens’ health — would overlap with the day-to-day lives of millions around the globe.

But to tell the story in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kim would fly across the Pacific, undergo a 14-day quarantine and sheath herself in a biohazard suit to make the film that came to feel more relevant to today’s world than she could have imagined.

Director Gina Kim checks lighting conditions during the filming of “Tearless.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

The veteran director’s journey turned into an unexpected discovery of parallels between the current health crisis and the ordeal of women who half a century ago found themselves at the mercy of both the U.S. and South Korean governments, yet for whom neither wanted to take responsibility. In both cases, the body was subject to larger forces.

“It would have been almost unthinkable to restrict people’s bodies this way in modern society. ... But it became a universal experience,” she said. “The political is manifest in individuals’ bodies.”

A production crew sets up spotlights for the filming of “Tearless” at an abandoned building known by locals as the “Monkey House,” near the U.S. military base Camp Casey in Dongducheon, South Korea. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Kim’s film is set in a now-overgrown and abandoned two-story building with barred windows once known among locals as the “Monkey House,” located in Dongducheon, a city about an hour north of Seoul where American soldiers have been stationed since the 1950s.

In the 1970s, the building with barbed-wire fences was one of several facilities where South Korean sex workers suspected of having sexually transmitted diseases were warehoused, often against their will, to be isolated and treated until they were cleared to return to brothels.

At the time, U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea had some of the highest rates of venereal diseases among American troops anywhere in the world. But the South Korean government, concerned the U.S. would scale back its presence on the Korean peninsula, was eager to see that their needs were met — including facilitating a robust sex industry that had sprung up around bases.

Director Gina Kim, far right, helps crew members coordinate the placement of props for a scene in “Tearless.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Part of that effort was an aggressive “cleanup” campaign to rid the women of sexually transmitted diseases. They were forced to wear numbered tags with health inspection records and those suspected of being infected were treated with penicillin against their will, according to testimonies of women and government records. Women said they were rounded up and confined, and feared that high doses of penicillin would lead to allergic reactions, with the possibility of death by shock.

For decades, little was publicly known about what happened to the women. Several high-profile murders of sex workers by American soldiers in the 1990s shocked the country and began raising awareness about their vulnerability and exploitation. Some of the women have sued the South Korean government in recent years for its complicity in their confinement and treatment in past decades. Their case is now pending before the nation’s highest court. Some 28,500 U.S. troops remain stationed in the country today.

“It’s unbelievable the type of forced treatment and immense control they were subject to,” said Kim.

The director had come across the “Monkey House” several years ago during her first virtual reality film project, 2017’s “Bloodless,” set in the same city and based on a true story about a brutal 1992 murder of a South Korean prostitute at the hands of an American soldier. The film won her the best VR story award at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.

Slate operator Jieun Nam watches the film crew stage a scene for “Tearless.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

She said she couldn’t believe the walls that had been witness to such pain were still standing, even though they were crumbling in disrepair, streaked with graffiti and damaged by amateur documentarians, shamans and thrill-seeking YouTubers exploring the building for its eerie past.

Kim wanted to transport viewers into the women’s experience through virtual reality. After extensive historic research and reading testimonials from women who’d been confined there, she was gearing up to shoot the film — titled “Tearless” — in 2020.

Watching anxiously from Los Angeles as the coronavirus numbers fluctuated in South Korea, Kim considered directing the film remotely from the U.S. by having a crew member strap an iPad to their chest so she could see what they were seeing as they moved through the building.

But South Korea, with a meticulous contact tracing regime and an early government response, was faring far better than the U.S. Film and TV productions began resuming within a couple months after the outbreak. And increasingly, Kim felt she had to be in the building — and to sense its ghosts — to direct the film the way she wanted.

In August, she landed in South Korea, where she underwent a government-mandated 14-day quarantine at an Airbnb in a busy neighborhood of Seoul. A smartphone app on her phone would immediately alert authorities if she ventured out.

Crew members listen as a scene is filmed for “Tearless.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

A couple days into quarantine, cut off from the world and marking the passage of time by changing slants of sunlight, she began to feel she was undergoing a somewhat analogous experience to what the isolated sex workers may have endured. Upon being identified as the source of an infection by an American soldier, at times falsely, South Korean women were confined inside the treatment facility for days or weeks at a time.

“I had no choice but to experience it in full for 14 days,” she recalled. “It helped me empathize emotionally ... even if it was 1/100th of what the women went through.”

She kept thinking back to how the health and fate of the women, many of whom were brought to the brothels by brokers as young girls from poor backgrounds, were an afterthought to the political considerations of decision makers — something that seemed to resonate more profoundly this year than most as more than 1 million people around the world have died from COVID-19.

“Political injustice becomes a matter of life and death,” she said.

Gina Kim helps arrange surgical tools for a scene in “Tearless.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

The surgical tools glinted in the light as Kim arranged them in careful disarray.

She sat as a doctor would have at the foot of the examination bed with stirrups, transporting herself back to the 1970s. Once the scene was set, she and the rest of the 26-person crew would duck into the hallway to allow the 360-degree VR camera to capture the room in its entirety.

Silence fell throughout the building. The camera rolled. Scattered throughout the two floors were all manner of debris left behind by curious onlookers — a suitcase, a car bumper, a Yankee’s cap, multiple futons. Late-summer mosquitos incessantly buzzed about.
Producer Zoe Sua Cho said even in the span of a couple months between the crew’s preproduction visit earlier in the summer and the day of shooting in mid-September, the deterioration of the structure was noticeable.

Slate operator Jieun Nam watches as the “Tearless” film crew prepares to shoot. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

“The building’s history and memory are disappearing,” she said. “There was an urgency to the story. The building itself is in danger.”

While there’s no telling what the world will look like by the time the film is ready for release next year, Kim said she was curious to see how the pandemic, with its loneliness, fear and graves, will color viewers’ reception of the movie.

“We’ve all experienced being locked away and isolated due to a virus,” she said. “We’ll never be able to go back.”

Director Gina Kim, shown during a moment of reflection, planned for years to tell the story of “Tearless.” (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

These Virtual Reality Films Are Blazing a New Trail in Storytelling and Art →

Strap on a headset and find yourself on a flooding island halfway around the world or in the body of a Homeland Security interrogator.

Dan Schindel

Virtual reality offers intriguing possibilities for documentaries. Before the advent of workable VR, many saw cinema as the medium with the most potential to transport the audience. Now, you can strap on a headset and find yourself anywhere, whether it’s on an island halfway around the world or in someone else’s headspace.

At the Camden International Film Festival, the Storyforms program incorporated over a dozen different documentary VR shorts, showcasing this promise. CIFF is an arm of the Points North Institute, an organization which runs several programs for developing artists in nonfiction filmmaking. Continually on the forward of documentary trends, the festival has done a better job of incorporating VR into its lineup than many comparable festivals that run on a much larger scale.

Some of the shorts simply placed the user in the midst of different milieus. Anote’s Ark VR, Matthieu Rytz’s counterpart to his feature-length film Anote’s Ark, shows selections of life on Kiribati, an island nation threatened with total destruction by the rising tides of climate change. In one sequence, you are in the middle of a song and dance, with drummers to one side of you and singers on the other. In Gina Kim’s Bloodless, the “camera” moves, shepherding the user through the alleyways of a Dongducheon, a makeshift town next to a US Army base in South Korea. Eventually, you “meet” a sex worker in one alley — a stand-in for a real-life woman who was murdered in Dongducheon by an American soldier in 1992. The short goes on to show her living conditions by imitating her movements throughout the last hours of her life, illuminating what it’s like to eke out a living by shaving scraps off an occupying force.

Bloodless (courtesy CIFF)

Benoit Felici and Mathias Chelebourg’s The Real Thing toys with the very idea of going to a “real” place in VR. Instead, it takes the user to a large-scale imitation: intricate sections of Chinese cities which are made to resemble parts of European cities like Paris, Venice, and London. There’s even a replica Eiffel Tower in Tianducheng, the sparsely populated “Sky City.” There are multiple dimensions of metafiction at play — real people living in real places which are copies of other real places, shown to you through a technological remove. Gliding over canals which you could easily mistake for the real Venice, you start to rethink what even counts as an authentic experience.

Other shorts involve an interactive element. In Kalina Bertin’s Manic VR, you use controllers to interact with what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder, at one point popping imaginary bubbles that float into view. For Asad Malik’s Terminal 3, visitors step into a replica airport security room and put on, not an Oculus, but a HoloLens, which projects an image of a young woman on the empty chair opposite them. The woman has returned to the US from a trip to visit family in Pakistan, and you take on the role of a Homeland Security interrogator — the short is programmed to respond to questions you ask aloud, and changes depending on which ones you choose to ask from those presented.

Not only does this implicate the user in American mistreatment of people of Middle Eastern descent, but the intimacy of the scene is gradually employed to a more fantastical effect. As it goes on, the hologram of the woman goes from a sketched-out wire frame image to a fully colored, more realistic one. She answers questions not as if she is sitting in an interrogation but on a first date, going into long monologues about her ideas on life. It transforms the cold setting into something deeper and friendly. Of course, perhaps someone who sticks to harsher questions will get a different outcome.

The immersion of VR will only grow greater as the tech improves. The possibilities are invigorating, especially in light of what creators are already able to do with the format. Works like the CIFF Storyforms are blazing a new trail in storytelling and art, and we’d do well to pay attention.

Entertainment Education: Top Teachers in Film, TV and More →

UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
Los Angeles, CA

An accomplished author and filmmaker whose virtual reality project, “Bloodless,” received the Venice Film Festival’s first award for virtual reality story in 2017, Kim brings a keen understanding of the future of entertainment technology; she is developing a VR series on transnational violence against women, and the importance of maintaining “the intellectual development of filmmaking” to bring new forms of communicating their perspective to these mediums. “The industry changes almost daily,” she says. “But the filmmaker’s vision and how s/he sees the world has to lead the way.”

Empathy without exploitation →

Is it possible to create a work of art about a murder without any depiction of brutality? Is it possible to convey a female victim’s suffering without exploiting her body? These were the questions director Gina Kim posed to herself during the creation of her virtual reality film “Bloodless.”

The work won the award for best virtual reality story at the recently concluded Venice International Film Festival. “Bloodless” is relatively bloodless. However, it is blood curdling, at an entirely different level, thanks to the VR experience.

Upon donning a Galaxy Gear VR headset, the viewer is transported to the current-day US Army camp town of Dongducheon in Gyeonggi Province. Korean residents walk by. US Army soldiers walk by. A woman, at once vivid and spectral, walks by, and we are allowed to witness the last few minutes of her life. 

It’s a quiet but shockingly immersive journey. The viewer feels very present in the area’s bleak streets, but is at once formless and helpless, unable to control anything that occurs. At the same time, the viewer is given immense freedom, one that we are not accustomed to in traditional, 2-D screen films: Our gaze is given the liberty to roam and focus on any aspect of the 360-degree environment we choose. A sense of inescapable seclusion is also present. Being locked into the virtual reality world through the mobile virtual reality headset is a solitary experience, unlike collectively watching a film in a theater.
 

A still from Gina Kim’s VR documentary film “Bloodless” (Gina Kim)

“All the information is given in a very loosely connected way. That was my intention, for the viewer to soak it all in. This is a military camp town. I wanted to show them, how fascinating and how depressing it is,” Kim told The Korea Herald in an interview Thursday at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, where the film was available for viewing.

By the end of the 12-minute film, the viewer has witnessed the infamous 1992 murder on which this documentary film is based. The case involved a US Army soldier stationed in Dongducheon who brutally raped and killed a female Korean sex worker. The sensational media coverage of the horrific murder included images of the victim’s body lying naked in a room, drenched in blood with various objects inserted into various bodily orifices.

The murder suspect was arrested by Korean police two days later and turned over to the USFK authorities, per the Statute of Forces Agreement between the two countries. Mass protests demanding that the soldier be tried in the Korean courts ensued, and he was eventually sentenced to 15 years in jail by a Korean court.

“I took part in the protests as a college freshman,” said Kim, who was a Western art major at Seoul National University at the time. 

“Every time I saw (the victim's) brutally mutilated body being endlessly reproduced in posters and flyers, I saw her dignity being once again destroyed.” 

With the incident deeply entrenched in her mind, Kim struggled for 25 years to find a way to transpose the historical and political issue of camp town sex workers into a personal and concrete experience without the element of exploitation. 

“But I kept coming up against the fact that I could not cinematically represent the story without exploiting the image (of the victim) and thereby reproducing the original violence itself,” she said.

The “absence of the body” and a refusal to indulge in the gory details were the core ideas from which “Bloodless” sprouted. But how does one make people feel without showing the body? “That was a paradox to begin with,” Kim said. 

After careful construction, the feat has been achieved brilliantly in Kim’s film. 

The despair of the town, the melancholy of the dilapidated motel room where the crime occurred, the horror of the murder, the loneliness the victim must have felt during the last few minutes of her existence all seep through -- but not once is the woman’s naked body shown. Not a single brutal act is depicted. 
 

A still from Gina Kim’s VR documentary film “Bloodless” (Gina Kim)

Though films dealing with murder cases and important historical events abound, almost all tend to harbor some inevitable element of voyeurism, Kim noted. Stories of violence in traditional cinema ultimately end up as variations of entertainment. 

“To put it very shortly and bluntly, any representation of anything is exploitation. But the question is, to what end? Where do you compromise?” 

After discovering VR a few years ago, Kim was stunned. This immersive medium, she felt, ensured that the viewer could no longer be a “passive spectator, who can take voyeuristic pleasure from a spectacle in front of them, and at a distance.”

“Bloodless” was shot with eight GoPro cameras. The images were stitched together in a technologically advanced and expensive post-production process. The venture was backed by Venta VR, a Korean producer of VR video content, and the Dankook University Graduate School of Cinematic Contents. 
 

The film set of Gina Kim’s VR documentary film “Bloodless” (Gina Kim)

VR has emerged as a new storytelling medium. Venice became the first film festival in the world to create a competition category for virtual reality films. It dedicated an entire island to its newly built, state-of-the art VR theaters. The upcoming Busan International Film Festival will also offer VR screenings. 

Until now, creators have focused on the “experience” aspect of virtual reality, which allows the viewer to be taken away to a fantastical world of animated gun fights and car chases. For Kim, however, VR meant a “completely new way of creating empathy.”

“A lot of people focus on the fact that it allows you to experience something. The question is ultimately, to what end? It’s fascinating, but to what end? Unless you do it carefully, it can become really sadistic, a self-indulgence of the creator. I wanted to do the opposite.”
 

Gina Kim poses with the Best Virtual Reality award for her movie “Bloodless” during the award ceremony of the 74th Venice Film Festival on Sept. 9 at Venice Lido. (AFP-Yonhap)

It seems fitting that empathy lies as the heart of Kim’s works -- a “sense of dislocation” is what has come to define her, she said.

The 43-year-old filmmaker earned a master’s degree in film at the California Institute of the Arts and taught at Harvard University’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Kim, who has served as a jury member at the Venice film fest, is currently a professor of film at the University of California, Los Angeles.

During her time in Harvard, in particular, surrounded by mostly Caucasian, male professors, Kim had felt an extreme sense of displacement. The department did not have a single Korean student back then. 

“There are two sides to it. Once you realize that you’re so extremely different from the rest of the group, in the end, you basically give up the idea of trying to fit in. That perspective can be nurturing and nourishing as an artist.

“But there is also a need for support. If you don’t have that group of people who really understand you and inspire you, it can become very isolating and difficult. But ultimately, I believe that people should be allowed to be who they are, beyond anybody’s expectations.”
 

Gina Kim is photographed on a film set. (Gina Kim)

But Kim believes the sense of being an outsider reaches beyond differences in nationality. Regardless of the environment, there are types of people who inherently feel out of place, Kim said. “You could have lived in one place your whole life, surrounded by homogenous people, and still feel distanced from your setting. Actually, I believe that anybody who is keenly aware of this and in search of his or her identity feels that way.” 

These days, the constitution of her classrooms is becoming increasingly diverse, she pointed out.

“One student was Arabic and raised in the UK but still wore a hijab. Yet she is completely British. Do I want to define her as either? That would be so silly. She’s both and more. The total can be greater than the sum of each element. People are diverse and that’s healthy.” 

Every film Kim has worked on has involved a co-production by two or more countries, with multinational actors. 

In 1995, upon moving to the US, Kim shot “Gina Kim’s Video Diary,” which presents a vision of the modern female nomad traveling fluidly between Asia and America, and was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. “Invisible Light” (2003) tracks the physical and psychological journeys of two Korean and Korean-American women. “Never Forever” (2007), the first coproduction between the US and Korea, engages the conventions of melodrama to examine gender, sexuality, race and class. 

“Final Recipe” (2013) is a Thai-Korean production and the first English-language film made by an Asian director with an all-Asian cast. 

Such transnational film projects are widely regarded as risky. Failing to deliver a coherent cultural voice, projects often end up a jumble and a flop, unable to relate to any target country’s audience. 

“I think ultimately, (transnational film projects) should come down to one last voice -- that of the director,” said Kim. “Someone who really understands the meaning of diversity.” 

Kim’s films have received varied responses in different countries. In Korea, “Never Forever” was seen as transcending the typical melodrama genre. In France, critics focused more on the issues of class. 

“You can’t speak to different groups of people on the same note, probably,” she said. “But there is a universal, common thread that can resonate to everyone, albeit in different ways. It’s important to find it. And it cannot be faked.”

“Bloodless” will be screened at the Busan International Film Festival, which will take place from Oct. 12-21. 

By Rumy Doo (doo@heraldcorp.com)

Director turns to virtual reality to tastefully show tragedy →

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — For 25 years filmmaker Gina Kim wanted to make a movie about the true story of a South Korean sex worker killed by an American soldier, but struggled with how to do so without feeling she was exploiting the victim. Then virtual reality arrivedThrough a partnership of storytelling and technology, Kim finally brought the 1992 murder to life in “Bloodless,” a 12-minute piece that won the award for best VR story at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The director said virtual reality is providing new ways to depict tragedies without making them into a spectacle.

“It allows you to feel the pain of others as if your own,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “VR is not cinema. It’s something else.”

Kim was a college freshman in 1992 when South Korea exploded in rage at the incident involving the soldier and sex worker in the town of Dongducheon, home to a U.S. military base 40 kilometers north of Seoul. Protesters, including Kim, took to the streets, trying to shed light on the grim conditions of sex workers and to urge the South Korean and American governments to bring the soldier to justice.

Yet it was during those protests that Kim first saw how apparently well-intentioned people could exploit the very person they were trying to help. Protesters seeking to highlight the case had printed fliers and posters of a leaked crime scene photo showing the unclothed body of the 26-year-old woman brutally disfigured and damaged. The image led to an outpouring of anger that eventually led to the soldier’s hand over for trial in South Korea, where he was convicted of murder.

Yet Kim and others lamented how the reprinted image was a form of violence against the woman and her family.

“I felt extremely disturbed and awful about it,” Kim recalled.

It was that memory that stifled Kim’s efforts to bring the story to cinema for so many years.

“I worked on it and stopped trying to come up with a better way of telling the story with the right ethics of representation and it was extremely difficult,” Kim said. The “cinematic medium is such a voyeuristic medium and the viewers enjoy what unfolds on screen as a spectacle.”

Only after she was introduced to virtual reality, was she able to find a way to portray the death.

“What I really ultimately wanted for the viewers (was) to not necessarily experience the horror of being murdered or being sexually assaulted,” Kim said. “But just to be there, with her, with genuine sympathy and empathy. I thought that could be possible with this medium.”

In “Bloodless” viewers are immersed into the streets of Dongducheon and the dinginess of a town left out of South Korea’s economic boom. As the day changes into a night, a woman emerges between neon signs, first with the click clack of her heels and gradually moving closer to the viewer.

Through alleyways, she takes the viewer to the club where she met the American soldier and eventually to a tiny room where she spent the last moments of her life. Coke and beer bottles are lying on a yellow floor. Minutes later, blood slowly flows out from under a blanket.

With virtual reality viewers wear a special headset and can turn their heads 360 degrees to see what is around them. Directors have less authority in what audiences can see because they cannot dictate the viewer to look in certain directions. Hence, each viewer may have a different experience with the same work.

“That’s the beauty of VR,” Kim said.

Kim Sunah, director of the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, said “Bloodless” was eye-opening.

“I didn’t know how VR could be used to tell an unsolved history of a victim,” she said. “Movies that depict violence against women can expose such violence but at the same time, it can become another form of violence itself.”

“Bloodless” is different in that “viewers become the victim,” the festival director said.

In games, shopping and even real estate, virtual reality is expanding its audience. Animators and journalists are embracing the immersive storytelling. The United Nations has experimented with the interactive storytelling, making a short movie to show its donors the crisis in Syria and life at a refugee camp.

Virtual reality is now making its way onto film festival circuits around the world. Venice this year became the first major festival to introduce a competitive program on VR titles. “Bloodless” has been invited to film festivals around the world, including in Australia and Brazil.

But due to the need for a headset, the distribution of the virtual reality work is limited. At the Korea Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Kim’s work was available to the public for only two days earlier this month and only about a dozen people could take part in a showing because of a limited number of headsets.

The technology is also not perfect. Users complain about feeling nauseous and the image quality can be low because unlike a traditional movie, creators do not have the liberty of installing artificial lighting on sets with virtual reality due to the use of a 360-degree camera.

Yet, the South Korean filmmaker believes in virtual reality’s potential. Virtual reality can tell the story of the marginalized and the underprivileged in a more powerful way than any other medium in human history, she said.

Kim next plans to make a series on transnational violence featuring women working at brothels in military towns.

For director, video art opens door to world

A Korean woman who hasn’t been a film director that long has rejoined the faculty of Harvard University to teach about what she knows about film production.

Gina Kim - who is known for “Never Forever,” released in 2007, and “Final Recipe,” currently in production - is teaching a class on film production in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University for a year.

The director, 39, came into the international spotlight in the early 2000s as her feature-length films “Gina Kim’s Video Diary” (2002) and “Invisible Light” (2003) garnered impressive critical acclaim and were shown at prestigious film festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival.

That led Harvard to notice the director. In 2004, she became the first Asian film director to teach at the school.

As a full-time lecturer at Harvard University’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, she taught between 2004 and 2007. So she isn’t an entirely new face at the school. Kim was ambitious about this academic year.

“I’ll be teaching both theories and practical exercises about film production,” she told the JoongAng Sunday. “I might also take up a master class, which teaches advanced film production process. I’m also thinking of holding a seminar that touches on everything about film drama that includes music and costumes.”

The Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard has been inviting film directors who are active in the field to give lectures at the school at least once a year, so that students are not just confined in ivory towers and can learn about the latest trends from active professionals. To give variety, they hire such people on one-year contracts. Lecturers have included Spike Lee, the award-winning American film director known for “Malcolm X” (1992).

Ambassador for Korean film

Still, it was a surprise when Harvard invited Kim, a female director who has just stepped into the film industry. So what did Harvard see in her?

“As ‘Gina Kim’s Video Diary,’ which was performance video art, and ‘Invisible Light’ which was an experimental play, received spotlight at international film festivals, books about them came out and some dissertations also mentioned them,” Kim said. “Torino Film Festival also held a special showing of them. I heard that a faculty member at Harvard University saw that by accident and sent me an invitation.”

While most film directors return to their job after a year of teaching, Kim worked as a full-time lecturer for three years straight. She said she had a reason.

“Harvard at that time was different from what it is today. It was like a closed society. Korea was barely known. Although it was years after the film ‘Oldboy’ made international headlines, people still had no concept of Korean film whatsoever. That prompted me to organize a Korean film festival. I heard it was the first such attempt at an Ivy League school.”

At the festival, she showed 15 representative Korean films from the 1960s to the present. The reception was better than she expected. She got calls from museums in Boston and New York, which wanted to hold a similar event. She said she got a letter from the dean that thanked her for the event that facilitated cultural exchanges and requested her to continue teaching.

And since about two to three years ago, she said she got requests from the school to return. Although she had been hesitant due to the film production she is working on, she finally decided to go back and teach, at least for the 2013 academic year.

In love with video art

Kim studied art in college and received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Seoul National University.

When asked if she wanted to be a filmmaker as a young girl, she said she never really thought of what she wanted to “become,” but only what she wanted to “do” or “make.” When Kim was a senior, a visual arts media class was offered for the first time at SNU. She said that’s when she learned how interesting video art is.

“I could understand why feminist artists in the U.S. were passionate about it when video art first emerged in the 1960s,” said Kim. “I was also attracted because it was a largely unexplored territory in Korea at that time, although it is now a generalized field. It was pretty revolutionary, I thought then, and that I should do it.”

She wanted to study at the graduate school of the California Institute of the Arts, which is known for its courses in film production. And she decided to be bold. She flew to Los Angeles and met with a professor at the school. She showed some of her work and said that she wished to study at CalArts. Her boldness worked. She was admitted not long after.

To Kim, video art opened a door to the world.

“I felt that it was a world that wasn’t defined yet, that had no language yet. Although it was dominated by male artists, it wasn’t masculinized yet,” she said. “Also, video art is all about instant feedback. You can also create while watching. It is a little bit narcissistic in that sense, totally different from other media that I’ve worked with.”

She said that the reason people give their best when drawing in a small room or writing a poem alone is because of the potential audience, an expectation toward unknown mass that the artist has never known or met. And video art is all about communicating and sharing with the audience.

The most democratic tool

Since she was young, Kim had been deeply interested in social issues, mostly due to her father, who studied social studies for a long time.

Although she pursued a bachelor degree in fine arts, her passion for social revolution stayed in her heart. She constantly struggled with what she thought were the limits of paintings, in particular in terms of communication with the public.

Her encounter with video art, in that sense, was destiny. She said she thought “no other medium is as democratic as video art.”

In fact, her early works appear to have clear messages. When asked whether which is more important to her when making films, “messages” or “popular appeal,” she said that “such a category in itself is an oppression.”

“I am a liberalist to the bone,” the director said with a laugh. “I think, in particular, Korea likes to categorize things by one standard. However, I don’t want to live like that. There are so many different sides and facets to consider.”

Kim did have her own definition of what a movie is. She quoted one of her professors at her graduate school, who said that “cinema translates time into space.”

“How to translate the memories of time into space, how to play something that we see into a story - isn’t that what film is about?” said Kim.

The latest story she told the audience was about a dangerous affair between a married woman and an immigrant worker in her 2007 film “Never Forever.” After reading Kim’s script, renowned Korean film director Lee Chang-dong and Lee Joon-dong, the CEO of Now Films, wanted to produce it. Other Hollywood producers joined the crew.

The film, a collaboration between Korean and American producers, stars Vera Farmiga, who is known for her role in the 2006 film “The Departed,” and Ha Jung-woo, who was a new face back then but is now a Korean heartthrob. It premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Jury Prize at the 2007 Deauville American Film Festival.

On the film, Variety wrote, “Kim’s highly sensitive camera turns the film into a chamber-piece of hushed eroticism and surprising narrative grip.” Martin Scorsese has also described the film as “a moving experience [in which] the performances are wonderful and touching, and the style ... intense and very precise.”

Five stories to tell

Kim says that she first saw Ha in “The Unforgiven” at the Busan International Film Festival in 2005. She said she, and many other directors, took note of him, saying that he is more than a pretty face and has the presence of a Korean movie star in the ’60s and ’70s.

After the critical success of “Never Forever,” Kim began to expand her influence. She was the first Korean female director to become a jury member for the 66th Venice Film Festival, and she became a member of the jury of the Asian Pacific Screen Awards in 2009.

She is currently is completing a China-Korea co-production film, “Final Recipe.” Starring Michelle Yeoh, the film has already gotten several invitations to renowned international film festivals. The film also features Henry of the Korean boy band Super Junior-M.

Kim said Yeoh “is the pro of the pros.” While shooting in Thailand in the sizzling weather of more than 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), there were more than 50 fire pots on the set but the actress never made an outtake.

Kim said that Yeoh also took time to show up at the set even though she was not shooting, saying that she wants to absorb the “vibe” of the set so that she can better immerse herself in her character and the story. While staying in the U.S. for a year to teach at Harvard, Kim plans to hold a large-scale exhibition on Seoul, her second project to let the world know about Korea. In addition, she also hopes to organize an exhibition on actresses.

“In today’s film industry, it is harder for actresses than it is for actors to have a ‘strong persona.’ But after working with some charismatic actresses like Vera Farmiga and Michelle Yeoh, I got to re-think about that.”

When asked about film directors, she said that it is the director’s role to “melt everything that he or she has into the film and help people feel every bit of it.”

“I have about five stories I want to tell before I die,” said Kim. “I wish to make them all into films.”

Park Shin-hong hkim@joongang.co.kr

Korean Filmmaker Becomes Professor At Harvard

A Korean filmmaker has been appointed full-time professor at Harvard University. 

Gina Kim, a film director active in the U.S., was made professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts, on Friday. 

Kim is known for her work not only as a director but also as a documentary filmmaker and academic. 

Her films explore issues such as gender, race, and diaspora. They also contain elements of Korean culture. 

Kim's works include "Gina Kim's Video Diary," which was completed in 2002, "Never Forever" (2007); "Invisible Light" (2003); and "Faces of Seoul" (2009). "Gina Kim's Video Diary" became one of her most noted documentaries.

"Never Forever," which starred top Korean actor Ha Jung-woo and American actress Vera Farmiga, is representative of her Korean-foreign works. 

She is currently working on a film, "Final Recipe." 

Kim graduated from Seoul National University where she studied art, and went on to receive her master's degree at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles County. 

She has already taught at Harvard University as a full-time lecturer from 2004 to 2007. 

She was the first Asian director to be invited to lecture at Harvard. 

The Department of Visual and Environmental Studies includes classes in studio arts and in theory. It offers courses in painting, drawing, sculpting, printmaking, design, film, video, animation and photography. 

Only current directors, who are still actively pursuing their career in filmmaking, are invited to be faculty in the department. Thus, contracts are often based on shorter terms. 

Kim will teach at Harvard for one year as a full-time lecturer, and will also aid students in their graduation pieces. 

She will also participate in a large-scale exhibition along with other U.S. video artists and musicians. The theme of the exhibition is Seoul.

Kwon Ji-youn jykwon@koreatimes.co.kr

KOREA TAKES LEADING ROLE IN APSAS

Seoul: The Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) today announced the appointment of acclaimed Korean writer-director, Gina Kim, to its 2009 International Jury.

The announcement was made at a creative industries networking reception in Seoul following the recent Asia-Pacific Cities Summit.

“Gina Kim is one of Korea’s most impressive young filmmakers and I warmly welcome her to the APSA Jury,” said APSA Chairman, Des Power.

“212 films from 43 countries have been submitted this year, a record number of entries. I know that Gina will make a valuable contribution to the difficult task of choosing those that best demonstrate cinematic excellence and attest to their cultural origins.”

Among the guests at the reception were notable Korean film industry representatives including members of the Academy of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and 2008 APSA Juror, Hanna Lee (Producer, Secret Sunshine).

Gina Kim attended the reception, arriving in Seoul direct from the prestigious Venice Film Festival where she sat on the Orizzonti Jury and presented the world premiere of her new feature length documentary Faces of Seoul.

Ms Kim said, “It is an honour to represent the Republic of Korea on the International Jury of the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and I look forward to collaborating with my fellow Jury members. An international award of this calibre is very meaningful to the way films are perceived and promoted around the world.”

Gina Kim’s appointment to the APSA Jury comes ahead of next week’s announcement of the 2009 Jury President.

APSA has had a strong association with the Republic of Korea since its inception with several films receiving APSAs including Ggeutnaji Anhmeun Jeon Jaeng / 63 Years On (Best Documentary Feature Film 2008), Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom / The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Achievement in Cinematography 2008)  and Miryang (Secret Sunshine) which was awarded Best Feature Film in 2007 and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for Jeon Do-Yeon’s performance in the film.

Eminent Korean filmmaker and author, Professor Hong-Joon Kim is the chair of the APSA Nominations Council, a distinguished panel of international film industry experts who meet in Brisbane, Australia next week to decide nominees in nine categories. The winners are then determined by the International Jury ahead of the third annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards ceremony on November 26, 2009, on Australia’s Gold Coast.

Born in 1973 in Seoul, writer-director Gina Kim graduated from the Seoul National University and then moved to the United States where she completed her MFA at CalArts. In her early work, Kim studied the female identity and examined issues such as anorexia (Flying Appetite, 1998), the commercialisation of the female body (OK Man, This Is Your World, 1995), isolation (Dache-ro-wa-jineun a-chim / Morning Becomes Eclectic, 2001), and the mother-daughter relationship (Kim Gina eui bidio ilgi / Gina Kim’s Video Diary, 2002). Kim Ginaeui bidio ilgi (2002) and Gen jip ap (Invisible Light, 2003) have screened at festivals throughout the world, including Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam, Turin and Vancouver. The highly acclaimed, Never Forever, produced by Lee Chang-dong and starring American actress Vera Farmiga, screened in competition at the Sundance Film Festival 2007 and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Deauville American Film Festival. Kim was nominated for Best New Director of 2008 in Korea’s prestigious Daejong Film Festival Grand Bell Awards. Kim taught film production and film theory classes at Harvard University as a full-time lecturer for three years from 2004 to 2007.

Kim’s new documentary, Faces of Seoul recently had its world premiere at the 66th Venice Film Festival where she sat on the Orizzonti Jury. She is currently developing a new feature film in English, produced by Martin Scorsese.

A cultural initiative of the Queensland Government, APSA is a unique collaboration between Atlanta-based CNN International, Paris-based UNESCO and FIAPF-International Federation of Film Producers Associations. APSA honours the works of filmmakers across a region covering 70 countries, one third of the Earth and half the world’s film output.

'Never Forever': Director subverts stereotypes

If you ask Korean-born filmmaker Gina Kim, cultural norms in film are easy to spot: "In European countries, Asian men aren't supposed to be sexual. On one end, there are geeky, perfect lawyers and doctors - not supposed to be sexual," she says. "And the fate of the East Asian immigrant is usually tragic. I wanted to subvert that."

She does just that in her latest work, "Never Forever." In the film, the Caucasian wife (played by Vera Farmiga of "The Departed") of a successful Asian American lawyer (played by David L. McInnis) struggles to have children with her husband. His infertility, coupled with his father's death, sends him into a suicidal depression. Desperate to help him, albeit in a twisted way, Sophie convinces an undocumented Korean immigrant, Jihah, played by Jung-Woo Ha, to let her pay him for sex. This exchange becomes untenable as Sophie and Jihah begin falling in love.

Kim, who studied film at Cal Arts and until recently was a film studies professor at Harvard, says she drew inspiration from Korean films of the '60s.

"It really was a golden age for Korean film," she says. "I was struck by how radical they were, even or especially compared to today. And they were extremely well made. They dealt with the desire of women."

Kim says that while eventually the misunderstood wives in the films either fell in line with traditional gender relations or suffered tragic fates, she was enthralled by the way they placed the women's sexual and emotional needs at the core.

Female desire, in one form or another, has been Kim's subject throughout her career. "Gina Kim's Video Diary" (2002) was the documentary that first put her on the international film festival circuit. She began filming during her first year at grad school, in 1995, as a lonely recent immigrant to Los Angeles. The overriding subject was her reckoning with her physicality, her ability to recognize and ask for what she wants. Her next film, "Invisible Light" (2003), dealt with the mirrored lives of two women, one married to a man named Jun and one having an affair with Jun.

"Never Forever" marks a historic partnership between American and Korean producers, which thrills Kim. The film was a "passion project," a quirky screenplay that she banged out in about three days. "When I was done writing, I thought, 'What do I do with this?' It's not exactly American, it's not exactly Korean." The characters, though, are unmistakably human.

Reyhan Harmanci