Livestock Industry of Korea

A cyclically awakening character or a show of both visual and sound errors are how Im deconstructs the pre-camera reality in his experimental film. The object of his interest is not the material world, but the power of the medium itself. The film appears as a living being, who with his mechanical limbs walks between the creator and the viewer. The medium as a divine algorithm decomposes reality and reassembles it. It dissolves the original meanings and floods things, places, and people with new collective beings.   "The traces of hidden time and dream were revived and playback eternally." PRISMA  

Words come and go like water. The flow of spoken French and English on the border of clarity resonates in static shots, filled with simple pictorial symbols. Speech is not the bearer of meaning but a poetic element, a symbol of cyclicality, the bearer of displacement and exile.   „If words are to be uttered, they would be from behind the partition. Unaccountable is distance, time to transport from this present minute. “ Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This film has a 500 views limit. Ryun-hee is eager to return to her native North Korea, which she left in 2011 to seek medical treatment. Little did she know that crossing the border with South Korea would make her an enemy of the state and that she would find herself forced to live a life in exile for many years to come. She embarks on an endless struggle with the authorities, who prevent her from returning home to her husband, daughter, and aging parents. Other families that have been torn apart by the border across the Korean peninsula face similar problems as those of our heroine. Seung-jun Lee tells us the story of a Kafkaesque world of bureaucrats and high politics, which for decades has broken family ties and left feelings of emptiness and shadows of memories in people's hearts.   “I want viewers to forget about refugee stereotypes or misconceptions about North Korea. This story is not about which system is better or worse, but about being human.” Seung-jun Lee

This key work of video art from the pre-Internet era presents the present saturated by sensory stimuli and its global dimension in a visionary way. The breathtaking psychedelic stream flows between avant-garde and the mass media, as well as among cultures. Allen Ginsberg, John Cage or Navajo, Korean and Nigerian artists ride the same wave.   “If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.” Nam June Paik

We are all Robinson in our own minds. It looks like a room where behind its walls the human soul wanders and drowns in helplessness. Until he discovers solid ground in the form of daily rituals, in the water spraying from the shower, or in the tea bag at the bottom of the mug. The banal detail, accompanied by the adaptation of Karel Krolow's poems and aliquot songs, is fed by spirituality.   "Cho's single-channel tapes and installations are formalist, almost painterly explorations of subjectivity and the subconscious." Seoungho Cho

In the port city of Ulsan, fishermen once worshiped the whale as an exalted deity. Today, the port is occupied by Hyundai's steelworks and shipyards. This captivating essay shows how metal colossi are born in the mechanical bowels of factories. Shafts, beams, and cranes of superhuman size form the graceful curves of the mechanical gods of the industrial age. In his second feature film, based on a video installation, Park recontextualizes industrial production. The levitating iron masses transform into artistic and religious artifacts against a backdrop of Mahler, Tibetan songs, and the sound of whales.   "I compose films rather than edit them - to me, it's like creating a piece of music."   Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

A voyeuristic evocation of a three-day funeral ritual presents death as a poetic and political affair. The phantasmagoric details of a dead body, hair, and human skin intersect erotically with intimacy, mystery, and fascination. Wet Dream is the haptic externalization of inner death in an oppressive society. “The film was shot without a screenplay, I don't maintain continuity of time and space, characters or story in it. The result is internal images created by combining fantasy and film experimentation.” Kim Yun-tae

Zen meditation, inspired by a series of ten Buddhist poems, reflects on the fate of two quinces. In vivid detail and framed by a red and white poetic acronym, these two fruits of the same tree set out on two fascinatingly different journeys. Each quince becomes part of a contemplative still life, both at a different pace and in a different space. They transform into an abstract part of the pictorial composition and, impartially, with the silent snowfall and the murmurs of rain and thunder, presenting the cycle of death and birth and departure and return.   "This film seeks to answer the question of what enlightenment is and how to achieve it." Ji-sang Lee 

A poetic study based on a series of images taken of Jupiter’s moons that captures how a terrestrial world bathes in the light of the largest moon in our solar system. Light rays transform organic structures into dispersed abstract images. When we close our eyes, we see the cosmic dimension of our consciousness in this foggy landscape. "My work is based on traditional Korean painting and my experience with abstract painting." Youjin Moon

Archival footage from 1923 of a walk through Busan and Seoul proudly points out land and ship transport, banks and palaces, everyday life in the streets, and festive moments. Only subtle hints - a Japanese-run national bank, or references to a former Korean monarch - reveal that behind the images of prosperity, economic power, and technological progress, a drama of an annexed country is taking place.

In preparation for the 1988 Summer Olympics, the Korean government evicted one hundred and sixty families out onto the streets. It demolished their houses in the slums of Seoul's Sanggyedong and had luxury apartments built in its place. Dongwon Kim lived with the evicted families for three years and filmed their fight against the state authorities. The alarming film reveals the averted face of a sporting event abused for ideological purposes. He ushered in a new era of Korean social documentaries, revealing the averted face of South Korea perceived as a land of fabulous wealth, happiness, and economic growth.   "The situation requires us to make films on social issues." Dongwon Kim

The clip, one of twenty news clips that Kim made for the American Information Service shortly after the end of the Korean War, tells the story of a car. The vehicle speaks in a continuous monologue to the audience as it follows the process of its demise and rebirth. The components move from the junkyard to the car factory, where they are transformed into the metal interior of a new vehicle. We are not just following the story of the car, but that of the entire country as it recovers from the war and builds a new economy, led by businesses like Hyundai, a symbol of prosperity and national pride.“How will humanity make enough for three meals a day out of post-war poverty?”Kim Ki-young