Jeg hopper på banen mot Vega Scene for å få med meg den Sør Koreanske filmfestivalen klokka ti denne lørdagen. I regi av Norsk Filmklubbforbund skal en gjeng filminteresserte folk lære seg om alt innen den stadig voksende koreanske filmverdenen. Det blir feil å si at filmer herfra har begynt å bli populære, for det har de vært i lang tid. Det er først de seneste årene at resten av verden og “mainstream cinema” virkelig har åpnet øynene.

Jeg måtte selvfølgelig utnytte mitt bekjentskap til de ansatte på Vega Scene for å få et kult bilde. Etter litt overtalelse. Foto: Fanny F. Overgaard / PRESSET.

En kaffe i hånda og Dr. Shin på øret

“I think The Host is something all audiences can enjoy and also there’s so much interest surrounding Bong Joon-ho now. I thought it would be good to show one of his earlier films. It’s a good example of how he uses genre tropes in the creative ways. And I mean, I find it really funny and the acting is great, so I went with that.”

— Dr. Chi-Yun Shin

Dagen starter med et foredrag av Dr. Chi-Yun Shin, som holder til på Sheffield Hallam Universitetet i Storbritannia. Hennes forskningsinteresser er samtidens øst-asiatiske film, og da særlig med tema innen kjønn, sjanger, adapsjoner og hvordan filmene blir tatt i mot. Hun snakker om Koreas historie og presenterer flere koreanske filmer som er verdt å legge merke til. Noen av dem har flere av oss hørt om, som for eksempel den Oscarvinnende filmen Parasite. Shin, som opprinnelig er fra Sør-Korea, viser stolt frem et klipp fra Oscar utdelingen da filmen vant. Hun sier at hun får gåsehud av å se klippet – noe jeg tror flere av oss også får. Det er noe med å se at filmer over USAs landegrenser vinner en slik pris.

Jeg sitter febrilsk og skriver ned spørsmål underveis i foredraget, da jeg skal intervjue Chi-Yun Shin etter dette. Men først skal vi se filmen The Host av Bong Joon-ho, som også regisserte den prisvinnende Parasite.

Filmen tar i bruk et dryss av virkemidler. “Snacks” som jeg kaller det. Jeg kjeder meg ikke et eneste minutt under de to timene. Som Shin sier er dette en film som passer de fleste – både filmnerder og andre folk.

“*The Host* is so layered. It looks like just a monsterfilm, but when you watch it again, there's so much layering. The detail is amazing. It's a brilliant film to teach about genre and social and political commentary,” sier Shin. Foto: Fanny F. Overgaard / PRESSET.

Koreansk film er mer enn tre ord

Av erfaring går arrangementer som dette ofte litt over tiden. I dag er inget unntak. Jeg får derfor bare presset inn en ti minutters prat med Shin før neste foredrag av Darcy Parquet skal holdes. En annen filmentusiast står allerede og prater med Shin, så jeg velger derfor å snike meg inn i samtalen deres. Etterhvert spør begge meg hvorfor jeg er her i dag, og jeg sier at det er i regi av dette studentmagasinet. Shin retter blikket mot filmentusiasten og sier ”you should join that!” Hun legger til (med et glimt i øyet) at hun gjerne vil bli kredittert hvis filmentusiasten faktisk blir med i Presset. Vi utveksler kontaktinformasjon før han går videre og jeg får min dyrebare tid med Shin. Jeg ser ned i den rotete notatblokken min for å finne mitt første spørsmål.

How do Korean films differ from mainstream Hollywood films? If you had to describe it in three words.

- There was actually a recent Guardian article headline about korean cinema that describes it as: ”funny, political and bone-crunchingly violent”. I have a problem with that in the sense that it defines the entire national cinema with those three words. This article came out just before Parasite won the Oscar for best picture. So it's saying that if Parasite wins the best picture, it will be an overdue recognition for the creative hothouse that is South Korean cinema. That korean film should have been recognized a long time ago. The whole article is very favourable and all that, but at the same time it's really trapping and defining the whole cinema with three different characteristics. I must add that there are many Korean films that are not violent at all, sier Shin.

Do you think we have the need to ”define with a few words” because we're so used to Hollywood cinema?

- Korean cinema is the only other national cinema that is alternative to Hollywood in many ways. It's very crowd pleasing, and people love it. At the same time, I understand what you're asking, but there are really a range of films that has come out of Korea that needs to be more exposed, sier Shin.

Hun fortsetter:

- This event we're having today is brilliant, because it introduces a range of Korean films to the Norwegian audiences. There is a huge pool of emerging filmmaking talents that are not really getting noticed much overseas. In international art cinema festival circuits they are very well known, but beyond that it's difficult really.

Kinotitting. Foto: Fanny F. Overgaard / PRESSET.

In your lecture you said that 1999-2000 was big years for Korean films. Is that happening now as well, with Parasite winning an Oscar and the popularity surrounding Squid Game?

- It's been going on since the late 1990s, but 2018-2019 was when the world suddenly noticed. If we look at Bong Joon-ho's films, Parasite is not too different from his earlier films. He has been making interesting feature films since 2000, and we all knew he's incredibely talented. But this time the world suddenly noticed it.

Why?

- It probably has to do with the distribution. His earlier films were not really widely distributed. Obviously he has been building up his reputation, but once his Parasite won the top prize (Palme d’Or) at Cannes Film Festival, the film and Bong got much attention. It's a really great timing for him. Then he won the Oscars, which made him the hottest director in the world.

På tampen får jeg spurt om hun har sett Verdens verste menneske. Jeg må innrømme at jeg kunne kjenne meg igjen i hennes stolthetsfølelse, og ble derfor nysgjerrig på hva hun synes om den norske filmen. Hun sier at hun så den på en filmfestival og at det var den beste filmen hun så der. Etter at hun har svart meg blir hun dratt med i mengden av folk som skal tilbake i salen for neste foredrag og film. Vi blir enige om å fortsette intervjuet på slutten av dagen.

Historie fortalt gjennom film

Darcy Parquet er en filmkritiker, filkurator, forfatter og foreleser. Han har jobbet med engelske undertekster til koreanske filmer, og da blant annet Parasite. Han stiftet også Wildflower Film Awards for å løfte frem koreanske filmer.

I Darcy Paquets foredrag går han i dybden på koreansk historie slik at vi skal forstå konteksten i festivalens siste film Peppermint Candy. Der følger vi en mann som har vært gjennom dystre begivenheter mange Sør Koreanere har hørt om eller har et nært forhold til. Filmen er mildt sagt en “hard watch” som Paquet beskriver den, men absolutt en film jeg ikke ville vært foruten å ha sett. Siden Shin og jeg måtte avbryte praten tidligere, fortsetter vi derfor praten etter denne filmvisningen. Når både Shin og Paquet følger med meg ned for en prat, sier jeg ikke nei takk. Vi er alle litt slitne etter en lang dag, men filmprat gir oss likevel energi til å snakke i en halvtime til.

“When society is constantly changing it feels quite vital that you make stories that tell something about how things are changing. Korean filmmakers are able to kind of capture really important stories, which gave them a lot of attention among their citizens”

— Darcy Paquet

It was so hard to watch a lot of those scenes, sier jeg og refererer til Peppermint Candy som vi nettopp så. Begge nikker i enighet.

- It's about trauma, you can almost feel the trauma as well, sier Paquet. Vi ler alle tre, fordi det er en litt sånn “skal vi le eller gråte” situasjon.

I didn't like the main character at all!

- No, you're not supposed to like him. He has got these eyes, which seem so... devilish. It's a bit like a maniac’s eyes. The actor Sol Kyung-gu was so good. He wasn't really a well-known actor at all back then. He had been in a few movies before that, but Peppermint Candy made him famous, sier Shin.

- He's been a big star ever since, legger Paquet til.

Why do you think that the movies in Korea have been successful (as in comparison to any other country)?

- To a certain extent it goes beyond cinema because TV has been a major cultural force since the 1970s in Korea. A lot of stars were created by TV dramas. Korea has had a really strong starsystem for decades. In some ways the weakness of the film industry in the sixties, seventies and eighties was because of the government creating all these harmful regulations that didn't allow it to naturally develop. When those restrictions finally were lifted then it could start to develop, sier Paquet.

Paquet utdyper:

- I think another reason for the popularity is that when a country is changing so dynamically then there's a lot of stories to tell. A lot of energy goes into storytelling: cinema in this case. Some people say that in the eighties you had all this energy that was in politics, the student movements, the labour movement and everything else, and that starting in the nineties that energy moved into culture.

- Mhm, I like that, sier Shin.

Darcy Paquet og Chi-Yun Shin. Foto: Fanny F. Overgaard / PRESSET.

Do you think Korean will be a world language some day? Because of the rising popularity of the cinema.

- Oh, interesting question, sier Shin mens hun ler.

- Certainly the number of people studying Korean is going up. K-pop probably was the number one reason for that. Because when you become a K-pop fan you naturally become curious about the lyrics. In the last 20 years the number of people studying Korean has just shot up, sier Paquet.

Is it a difficult language to learn?

- Yeah, oh yeah, sier Shin.

- My kids make fun of my Korean. Haha! And i've been studying it longer than they have. But they grew up there, sier Paquet.

I heard Norwegian kind of sounds the same as Mandarin, legger jeg til av nysgjerrighet for om de hører det.

- Actually I did think that certain bits sounded kind of Chinese-ish. But it mostly sounds like Swedish, sier Shin.

Scener fra dagens siste film. Foto: Fanny F. Overgaard / PRESSET.

- I don't think Korean is gonna be a world language. But we never thought that this would happen, all this interest in Korean culture, so who knows, sier Shin.

- I studied Russian where I did my undergraduate degree in Minnesota, and there were quite a few Russian majors in my year. I visited them a few years ago and the Russian department is about to close because nobody is studying it. At the same time people in the administration in the university were asking me “is there any way you can help us find a Korean teacher?” They said that there's so many students here that want to learn Korean, sier Paquet.

- At British universities, Japanese and Chinese used to be much bigger than Korean studies, but now the popularity of Korean studies courses is rapidly growing, and so many people are interested in learning Korean language, legger Shin til.

“Disbelief was the earliest stage”

I bet people in Korea are proud of the recognition of their cinema!

- Well, I mean Darcy would know that better than me (since he lives there), sier Shin og titter bort på Paquet.

- Yeah, there have been several stages. I mean, disbelief was the earliest stage. Haha! In the nineties nobody really consumed Korean content or knew almost anything about the country. In Korea, the change was in the early nineties. Cause when I first came to Korea in 1997, I asked my students ”so what do you think of Korean movies?” They all said ”we don't watch Korean movies”, sier han.

Paquet utdyper:

- There are a lot of fascinating films I really like from the nineties, eighties and earlier. But they tend to be quite serious and heavy. Starting in the late nineties there were movies that really applied to younger viewers. 2001 was the year that the local market share went over 50%, so Korean movies were selling more tickets than Hollywood movies.

Kultur og myndighetene

- I think it's helped Korea that the governments have been more supportive and they've invested money into the infrastructure, legger Paquet til til slutt.

- Particularly the Korean president we were talking about in the seminar, Kim Dae-Jung, had a vision. He was an amazing statesman who saw the culture and digital sector as an area we really needed to push. And that really helped I think, as giving a direction for the success of the cinema, sier Shin.

Etter en halvtime kommer en mann bort og sier at de må dra videre for å rekke en middag på Aker Brygge. Jeg takker for en innholdsrik og spennende dag, før våre veier skilles.

Koreansk film er mer enn bare tre ord