West 32nd
By Annabelle A. Udo
Korean American filmmaker Michael Kang (winner of the SFIAAFF’s Best Narrative Feature Award in 2005) returns with West 32nd, a deftly written, detective-style film about an ambitious lawyer (played by John Cho, who can be seen elsewhere at the festival in Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay) whose intention is to free a teenager charged with murder but ends up rolling deep with a posse of “gangstas in training” in Manhattan’s Koreatown, or K-Town as it is colloquially known.
The story revolves around a “room salon” on West 32nd Street, which is the commercial business center of Koreans in New York. Room salons are a South Korean phenomenon, considered to be playpens for the wealthy and primarily attracting businessmen, who spend hordes of money for a few hours at a table where women pour drinks, sing karaoke, dance and negotiate “off-site activities.”
Kang derived the idea for this film from a case involving an actual murder in New York, where a young boy was forced into a confession for a crime he did not commit. By chance, Kang met a reporter at the Village Voice who had been working on an exposé of Korean American gang culture, and from that, West 32nd was born.
With lots of dialogue in English and Korean, this is a gripping film that expresses well the tensions between traditional Korean culture and the Korean American hybrid.
West 32nd is this year’s SFIAAFF Centerpiece Presentation, which will be shown on Sunday, March 16, 6 p.m. at the Castro Theatre.
<>Grandmother’s Flower
By Anh Lê
Grandmother’s Flower is a subdued, yet powerful, documentary by Korean filmmaker Mun Jeong-hyun, which won the Best Documentary Award at the 2007 Pusan International Film Festival and will have its North American premiere at the S.F. International Asian American Film Festival.
Mun was inspired to make this documentary a “family album,” while his grandmother was ailing. He visited his grandmother’s hometown, Sangdae, which has a history of landowners and is regarded as the “upper village,” as well as working-class Pungdong, a “lower village.” Mun’s interviews convey some of the class separation that exists, much of which can be traced to feudal times.
Mun’s family album includes a maternal grand-uncle, who, accused of being a “Red” sympathizer during the Korean War period, was shot and killed by a close acquaintance. This act of betrayal was one of many stories of suffering and tragedy experienced by Mun’s grandmother, reminding viewers of the tragedies, betrayals and senselessness experienced during war.
This documentary conveys the stoic nature of the people in the family album and, one surmises, of the Korean people. Yet beneath the stoicism lies the bitterness, pain, anguish and suffering of a people and a nation scarred by war, occupation and division — division within and without.
Grandmother’s Flower will screen on Saturday, March 15, 2:30 p.m. at the Sundance Cinema Kabuki and Sunday, March 16, 3 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.
<>Never Forever
By Philip W. Chung
Many Asian Americans can identify with being the only island in a sea of Caucasian faces. Filmmaker Gina Kim nicely inverts this situation in her feature
Never Forever.
Here, it’s Sophie (The Departed’s Vera Farmiga) who is married to Korean American golden boy Andrew (David L. McInnis), and desperately trying to fit in with his family and culture, going so far as to attend Korean-language church services she cannot understand. She is treated like an alien; her piercing blue eyes and blond hair marking her as foreign in this world. The only way she can find any measure of acceptance is to bear Andrew’s child. But Andrew is sterile, so Sophie approaches an illegal Korean immigrant named Jihah (rising Korean star Jung-Woo Ha) and pays him to impregnate her. Complications arise when Sophie and Jihah start to develop feelings for each other.
All this sounds like the setup for a modern-day version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. But Kim is more interested in what makes her characters tick, rather than mechanisms of the plot.
And Never Forever’s secret weapon is the talented Farmiga. She pitches her performance just right and makes believe a woman would make such choices. She’s matched by Ha’s wounded immigrant, who slowly realizes that his dreams will never become reality. Unfortunately, McInnis’ character is the most broadly drawn, and the actor doesn’t have the chops to fill in the details himself.
Sirk used the melodrama to poke holes at the ideal of 1950s suburbia. Kim uses the genre to do the same to a Korean American culture that values things like material success and procreation as the path to fulfillment. It’s paradoxically both a harsh indictment and sympathetic look at the Korean American experience that could only come from someone who knows that world firsthand.
Never Forever will screen on Saturday, March 15, 9:15 p.m. at the Clay and Sunday, March 16, 7:50 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. It will also open in New York,
Los Angeles and San Francisco on April 11.