The film begins and ends with a montage of the spaces in which the story takes place, moving from water to land: the sea, rocks, a river, flat terrain where only puddles of water remain, wooden carcasses of boats and structures, even the bones of what seems like the titular creature. Between the beginning and end, the greater …
Park Jung-bum’s second feature, one of the Jeonju Digital Project feature films for 2014, begins with a man chopping wood in the countryside, in the bitter cold. He is alone and determined in his actions, captured in long takes. The next sequence consists of a woman whose face we do not see; with her back to the camera, she takes off her blouse and begins to flagellate herself with a branch. She then nears the wall of the room in what …
The debut feature of Shim Sung-bo is a leviathan of a film, given its production values, socio-historical and emotional scope, and subject. At one level, it tells of a rickety, small-time fishing vessel whose captain agrees to smuggle twenty-five Korean Chinese into South Korea in order to save the ship from being sold. Though new to …
Nguyen Hoang Diep’s feature film debut has the simple premise of a college student who finds that she is about fifteen weeks pregnant. With a hypersexual boyfriend who is more preoccupied with earning money through cock fighting than with helping her think through the decision of keeping the baby or having an abortion, Huyen (Nguyen Thuy Anh) finds herself at a crossroads. But Nguyen takes this premise and rejects its …
At one point in Diao Yinan’s third feature film, the camera presents the point of view of a car that is reaching the end of a tunnel. The year is 1999. A thick snow covers the road. To the right of the lane are a parked motorcycle and a man slumped on a block of cement. The camera with the car’s point of view passes him by.