ZEITGEIST

Review by Darcy Paquet

    Driving With My Wife's Lover

What do you do when you suspect that your wife is having an affair? Tae-han, a shy, middle-aged man who makes a living engraving seals, decides to confront the issue as directly as he can. He leaves his seaside town and travels to Seoul where his wife's presumed lover, a taxi driver named Joong-shik, lives. Waiting for the right moment, he flags down Joong-shik's taxi and asks him for a long distance drive back to his hometown. Joong-shik agrees, and their journey begins.

The pair are about as different as two personalities can be. Joong-shik chatters without pause, flirts with all the women he meets and believes that life is basically what you make of it. Tae-han feels disturbed and threatened by this youthful energy, particularly when it starts to get him entangled in various awkward and ridiculous situations. Soon enough, though, it sets him to thinking about his own life and marriage. Could this man and his wife really be in love? Not that such thoughts distract him from his goal of revenge -- after all, Joong-shik has a wife too.

Kim Tai-shik's debut film premiered at the 2006 Pusan International Film Festival before going on to screen at Sundance, Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, and other festivals. The creative energy of Driving With My Wife's Lover is most apparent in the first half, powered along by the lead characters' idiosyncratic quirks and various unexpected turns in the narrative. When the road trip ends and the film moves into its second half, a darker mood settles in and the film takes on a more realistic turn.

Great casting goes a long way towards making up for what is a fairly thin premise for a film. Park Kwang-jung, so memorable in his role as the poet Rimbaud in Song Neung-han's No. 3 (1997), expresses as much with his thin, lanky body as with his voice, and manages to make Tae-han sympathetic without being admirable. Jeong Bo-seok of Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors hits just the right balance of charisma and deviousness in his portrayal of Joong-shik. However the brightest light in the film is Jo Eun-ji (The President's Last Bang), who plays Joong-shik's wife. Jo has an unusually lively screen presence, and we end up seeing much of the film's second half through her eyes. When she begins to tire of life and grow weary of her husband's antics, we feel ourselves being pulled down with her.

It's hard to say if Driving With My Wife's Lover achieves what it set out to do. Was I supposed to feel claustrophobic and grounded in the second half, after cruising along with the film's easy creativity in the first? If so, then I guess the film can be termed a success, but I'm not sure that will make me any more fond of it.      (Darcy Paquet)

Review by Darcy Paquet

    Our School (2007)

Our School may not seem at first glance to be a particularly eye-catching documentary. Centered on a K-12 school for Korean students in Hokkaido, Japan, the film contains few dramatic twists and for the most part just observes the students at school interacting with each other and expressing their thoughts. Nonetheless the film achieved remarkable popular success within the realm of independent cinema, attracting more than 70,000 viewers over four months, partly by promoting community screenings in provincial cities throughout Korea. At the time of this writing it is the most succussful Korean documentary of all time.

What made this film so popular? South Koreans will obviously view it differently from people of other nationalities, in that it touches so much on issues of Korean identity. Set in a country where discrimination against Koreans exists on both a personal and an institutional level, the film shows how Korean culture and language serve to create a unique, close-knit community for these strikingly idealistic kids. As one student puts it, "It's a different matter to maintain your national identity in South Korea, your homeland, compared to Japan. In South Korea, you can keep it passively, you don't need to exhibit it, but for Korean residents in Japan, if you don't demonstrate it, it will fade away."

There is also the issue of language. Non-Koreans watching this film will in one sense be experiencing it in black-and-white, in not being able to hear the distinctive Korean dialect that is a product of the students' upbringing. In this and other respects, I imagine that Korean viewers find in this film a fascinating mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Director Kim Myung-jun narrates Our School with simple, straightforward observations, and as viewers we can sense the personal warmth he feels for the students. However he is somewhat coy, at least initially, in presenting the political dimensions to his story. Only after a thorough introduction to the school, the teachers, the students, and various school programs does he mention that the school was founded with support from North Korea. Most of the students also seem to feel a stronger bond with the North than the South, though they are in no way hostile to the latter. Later on, the oldest students in the school take a trip to the North, which they find tremendously inspiring, even as it further alienates them in Japan, where anti-North Korean feeling is rising.

Perhaps the most surpising aspect of this documentary is the sincerity, values and passion that you find in the words of these teenagers. They represent perhaps a unusual case of being schooled in socialist ideals while growing up within a capitalist system. The contrast with teenagers from contemporary South Korea could not be more striking.

Yet in many ways the students' lifestyle is in danger of disappearing. The school faces declining enrollment, both due to the shrinking population of Hokkaido and to the fact that many parents are nervous about depriving their children of an education in Japanese schools. Institutional discrimination doesn't help: the government has designated it a vocational school, making it more difficult for the students to attend university. Parents had to fight even to get the street in front of the building declared a school zone.

In some ways director Kim avoids asking the hard questions in this documentary. Issued related to North Korea, for example, or the even more blasphemous question: would it really matter if these students were to lose their Korean identity, and fully assimilate into Japanese society? Though I suppose to a certain extent these questions can be found within the documentary itself, in the students' passion and the conviction of their beliefs.

For me personally, Our School was intriguing, but not nearly as involving and thought-provoking as Kim Dong-won's Repatriation, to name another local documentary that became a theatrical hit. I also found myself being more drawn in by another recent documentary that examined the relationship between Japan and Korea: Kim Deok-cheol's People Crossing the River (despite that film's structural faults). Maybe it was Our School's fascination with Korean collective identity that left me, as a non-Korean, feeling left on the outside. Nonetheless, I learned a lot over the film's 131 minute running time, and anyone with a special interest in this area will find it a worthwhile viewing.      (Darcy Paquet)

     Our School ("Uri-hakkyo"). 131 min., DV, color. Directed and narrated by Kim Myeong-jun. Produced by Studio Nurinbo. Edited by Kim Myeong-jun and Park So-hyun. Distributed by Jinjin Pictures. Co-winner of Woonpa Fund Award for Best Documentary at 2006 Pusan International Film Festival. Released in Korea on March 29, 2007. Seoul admissions: 19,202. Seoul admissions: 32,154. Nationwide admissions: 55,815 (70,000+ including group screenings).

A report from Adam, and a final report from Kyu Hyun...

Adam's Report

My time at PiFan was brief, but well spent. Juggling friends and film, I began with something new for me at a South Korean film festival - music. I met three of my ex-pat-ing friends at Bucheon's Citizen Hall because one of my friends is a huge fan of the Korean band Deercloud and they were playing, along with two other bands, after the international premiere of the Japanese film Nana 2 (dir. Otani Kentaro, pictured). The female lead singer of Deercloud has a nice, husky voice that I've found myself drawn to as well. I anxiously await their CD as my friend has, since they've been delayed in its production having to hone a new drummer after their original drummer was called in for his obligatory military service, complications one would think quite a few young Korean bands run into. Deercloud shared billing with two other woman-fronted bands, including a lite-riot-grrrl band called something like Scary Cat, but I'm not sure if that's correct. One of the gimmicks of that band's lead singer was to occasionally make a piercing scream that caused me to face up to how old I've become, wanting to say after the second scream, 'Please don't'.

The films didn't come for me until the next day. During that day, I was able to meet all but one of the film friends/colleagues I'd hoped of meeting, plus made the acquaintance of some new ones, in the nicely random ways that festival chaos allow - Paolo Bertolin in line at the PiFan chartered bus stop, Tom Giammarco in a park outside the CGV theatre, Darcy on our way to E-Mart to look for the plug adaptor we never found, and Kyu at a chocolate cafe outside the CGV. Traveling to films, processing after films, reconnecting after months of seeing each other, these moments are always too brief, but they are still, nonetheless, greatly appreciated and add as much to festivals as the films themselves.

Speaking of the films, I wanted to focus on South Korean films, but the overlap between my schedule and the festival's only enabled me to catch two recent ones - Resurrection of the Butterfly and Beautiful Sunday. The former is salvaged in my mind for the journey it was more so than the finished product. The idea was to couple a student director with a more experienced director, so student Kim Min-sook was coupled with veteran Lee Jung-gook. The film connects the three primary actors through two stories of love triangles. Director Kim's story works off the historical character of Non-gae from the Chosun Dynasty, a kisaeng known for remaining loyal to the Chosun dynasty by killing the Japanese commander who conquers her village rather than transferring her services as a prostitute/performer to the Japanese. Liberties are taken with this historical character's story that might upset the purists in the audience, but no claim is made that this represents what happened. This is merely speculative history, a 'what if' scenario pondering different trajectories from different outcomes, hence part of the reason for its presence in the line-up for this Fantastic Film Festival. The second story finds a man whose head injury limits his recall into the events that preceded his appearance deep into the mountains, where a mountain ranger finds him. Only a diary leads to clues about who this man is and what he's done. Ironically, it is the student's first half that shows greater promise than the veteran's second half. But when I was informed that veteran Director Lee directed the excruciating The Letter (1997), it made sense that the student would surpass the veteran here.

Jin Kwang-kyo's Beautiful Sunday also works with essentially two stories of past and present, but weaves them in and out of each other. Aware of narrative conventions, you know these stories will turn out to be connected, but how they are connected is nuanced enough that many might find the conclusion unexpected. A police detective has been pushed to taking bribes to cover his wife's medical bills and all this stress has also pushed him into various states of insomnia and alcohol abuse. The other story follows a young man whom we soon discover is a rapist. Where this film excels is in some well directed dialogue (at least considering the English translation) in the rapist's story, along with a horrifying revelation of his identity to his wife later on in his story.

I attempted to catch another South Korean film, Kim Sam-ryeok's Aseurai, but a volunteer guided me into the wrong theatre, where my (falsely) assigned seat constrained me too greatly to leave when I finally realized I was about to see the Japanese film Fuckin' Runaway (pictured) instead. Kyu notes above how he had apprehensions about this film directed by Motohashi Keita and initially I thought I was going to agree with him, having an aversion as of late for films that romanticize mental illness. However, the film slowly grew on me as I traveled alongside our main characters, escapees from a mental health facility, for this road trip through Japan, their psyches, and the intersubjective therapies of their friendship and their eventual courtship. What probably most warmed me to the film were its subtle droppings of dialect and the stereotypes Japanese hold about those who possess said vocal signatures. Such are the kinds of cultural nuances I will not fully apprehend, but would like to know more about and hear about from others who have seen this film.

The only other non-Korean film I saw was the Australian gross-fest Feed. Part of the nightly "Forbidden Zone" at PiFan, director Brett Leonard takes us into the life of an Interpol internet sex crime detective as he investigates a feeder/gainer relationship. The text at the beginning of the film claims this film is based on real events between consenting adults. I'll leave verification of that statement to others, but Feed informs us that feeder/gainer relationship is an S/M variation where one person (the feeder) feeds someone else (the gainer) with the goal of reaching Herculean poundage in the gainer to the point of immobility and complete dependency on the feeder. Our detective has found himself a feeder whose goal appears to be more than that, feeding his gainers to death. (And this leads him from Sydney to, of all places, the Toledo, Ohio suburb of Sylvania, furthering the stereotype of the girth possessed by those of my home state.) This film allows me to utilize one of the newly anointed words by the Mirriam-Webster dictionary - This is a ginormously sick film. Sickness, of course is part of the point of films like this and the type of films festivals like PiFan celebrate. The film suffers from a poor use of actor Jack Thompson and the occasionally heavy-handed dialogue, even heavy-handed for a film of this genre, but otherwise it entertains within its own genre-determined parameters, making you intentionally disgusted and disturbed.

The highlight of the festival for me was the 4-film retrospective of director Lee Bong-rae (pictured). According to the PiFan program, Lee was born in 1922 and studied in Japan where he worked as a journalist. Coming back to the Korean peninsula after the Korean War, he began work as a critic and scriptwriter. Of the four films screened, I caught three - The Petty Middle Manager (1961), New Wife (1962), and A Salaryman (1962), only missing the one given the poor English title of The Door of the Body (1965). Each one I caught left me truly delighted.

Apparently, Lee's best known film is The Petty Middle Manager which follows the troubles of a patriarch as his daughter joins his firm just as his boss demands he open up a dance school in the free room on the floor of his division for his boss's mistress. This said boss will return, as will his treacherous ways, in A Salaryman where our ethical patriarch refuses to enable his boss's embezzling of money from the company and finds himself fired and competing for a position at another company with none other than his eldest daughter. Each of these films works its plot tension around the predicament of the rapid modernization of South Korea and its effects on family roles, particularly changing courtship rituals. The changing views of marriage dominate in New Wife where the matriarch attempts to sabotage a son's marriage to a farm girl in hopes of arranging his marriage to a woman of a higher social standing.

Lee's films are engaging and humorous. (Check out the lobby fight scene in New Wife or the awkward scolding of father in front of daughter by father's boss in The Petty Middle Manager.) Each provides wonderful swatches of the wider shifting social tapestry of modernization that South Korea was experiencing in the 60's. (Interestingly, two of the films have a character make disparaging comments about movie-goers. Ironic when you think of it, since such ridicule implicates everyone watching the particular films.) They are also films that are slightly damaged. The first ten minutes of the surviving print of New Wife contains no visuals, only dialogue. (Since New Wife was originally a radio drama, it makes me curious if the dialogue used was from the radio drama rather than the film.) The reverse happens in the middle of A Salaryman, ten minutes of visuals without audio. The quality of the prints is what led the volunteers to apologize to me and other western patrons profusely, almost to the point of appearing to discourage ones attendance. Thankfully, I didn't heed these apologies. (And so as not to give a false impression, the volunteers do a tremendous job at PiFan, as at all South Korean festivals I've attended. In the example I gave above of being guided into the wrong theatre, it was as much my fault as theirs. I should have checked the signage as we were going in.) Although not appropriate for a Fantastic Film Festival, I was glad to have the opportunity to catch this director about whom I was ignorant. Regardless of the presence of such films being an aberration, I have now gone from ignoramus to acolyte concerning Director Lee Bong-rae and will preach his praises from here on out.

Kyu Hyun: Report #2

The future identity of PiFan, as Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival is affectionately known, was one of the topics floating around in the moist, rain-drenched air among the guests, panelists and journalists. Festival Director Han Sang-joon, himself a former journalist and a well-known cinephile/film critic who recently translated a French-language study of Francois Truffaut into Korean, is known to be oriented toward intellectually challenging and aesthetically sophisticated films, but is well-versed enough in the traditions and future directions of fantastic cinema worldwide to avoid making strange choices like putting Breakfast at Tiffany's in the "Family" section of the festival. It seems pretty obvious to me, though, that Han and quite a few others involved with the PiFan want it to be something more than a holy site for the fans of Asian cult horror films. I wouldn't be too surprised if PiFan eventually loses "Fantastic" in "Fantastic Film Festival" and be reborn as "PiFF"--wait, isn't that already taken by Busan? Oh, Busan is now spelled with "B," per the We-don't-want-to-use-McCune-Reischauer-'cause-Chinese-use-Pinyin alphabetization system.

The aforementioned "cult horror film" fans have always had a convenient way of celebrating their tastes, i.e. midnight screenings, but the always-well-attended all-nighters in Puchon, for two years in a row, have been overwhelmed by the Masters of Horror TV series. I mean, yes, MOH have presented really great horror shorts in the rate of maybe one per every four episodes, and in South Korea, where the DVD market is barely showing signs of life, it makes sense that both fans of classic horror (recognizing name-value directors like Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante and Dario Argento) and casual fantasy fans would descend on Puchon to watch the episodes projected on big screens. I managed to catch three episodes (Tobe Hooper's The Damned Thing [pictured], Stuart Gordon's Black Cat and John Landis's Family), all enthusiastically received by the overwhelmingly young Korean audience.

By sheer chance, I also caught Kaw, a direct-to-DVD quality update of Hitchcock's Bird with ravens instead of seagulls, and it was a mighty confusing experience because Sean Patrick Flannery (most famous for playing the arch-villain Greg Stillson in the TV drama Dead Zone) plays a dour and depressed sheriff in that movie and also plays a dour and depressed sheriff in The Damned Thing. What the heck? Anyway, Kaw is simply a generic nature-runs-amok film in which, of all things, Mad Cow Disease is given as an explanation for the raven's strange behavior, including banding together as packs and apparently developing military strategies against hapless humans. It had never occurred to me that Mad Cow Disease actually could make the infected animals smarter before killing them off. The Damned Thing was a trifle better, mostly more energetic, with blood and guts flying off with greater enthusiasm, but even though penned by an ace screenwriter (Richard Christian Matheson), it really didn't do a good job of adapting Ambrose Bierce's short story, which by the way keeps the monster truly invisible until the very end. The episode's version of the monster is disappointingly similar to the oil-slick beastie in Dean Koontz's Phantom, and its bleak ending was telegraphed well ahead. John Landis's Family was a notch above the ultimately pointless Damned Thing, turning out to be a well-scripted if predictable horror comedy, reminiscent of Bob Balaban's underrated Parents. George Wendt is well-cast as the psychotic protagonist and gives a good performance but I think it would have been more fun if Landis had cast someone like Bruce Willis in the role. Nah, maybe not.

In any case, it was Stuart Gordon's Black Cat (pictured) that stole everyone's thunder--or tongue. Jeffrey Combs of Re-Animator fame gives perhaps the performance of his career as Edgar Alan Poe, whose writer's block may or may not be resolved by the presence of an evil black cat Pluto, beloved by his tuberculosis-stricken teenage wife Veronica. The bulk of the episode, other than a few wink-wink homages to Roger Corman's Poe adaptations, is a completely faithful retelling of Poe's classic story. There are no gimmicks, no CGI, no synth noodledy-doodle score: it's simply Poe in his own voice, as the tortured alcoholic genius re-fashions his pathological obsessions and propensity for petty cruelty into a fictional descent into hell that has lost none of its power to grab and squeeze a viewer's heart after more than a century. A loving tribute to Poe, the Black Cat episode drew a spontaneous applause from the young audience and may well be the best film I have seen in the entire festival. So there is good reason why TV is trumping theatrical cinema in the US now, after all.

This year's Korean classics retrospective at Pucheon was an inspired choice, a triptych of comedies and one melodrama directed by Lee Bong-rae. Samdeung gwajang, (The Third-Rate Section Chief, 1961) given an awful English title A Petty Middle Manager, is not only a rare glimpse into the milieu of the post-April 19 "revolution" Korea, after students and citizens had toppled Syngman Rhee's dictatorship in 1960, but also a showcase for the amazing acting prowess of Kim Seung-ho. Kim plays a decent, soft-spoken salaryman patriarch critically lacking in self-confidence, and forced to take responsibility for the improper use of company resources by his villainous superior (Kim Hee-gap). Nearly all of Section Chief's characters are smart, capable of witty repartee, and optimistic to the point that they seem to hail from some alternative history of Korea. At the center is Kim Seung-ho, whose subtle performance, full of pathos yet with twinkles in his eyes, makes even the patriarchal I-am-the-bus-driver sermon he delivers at the end wholly endearing and believable. The film's only glaring problem is that Do Geum-bong, who plays the protagonist's vivacious and ambitious daughter, looks only four or five younger than Hwang Jeong-soon, playing her mother. While not exactly an undiscovered gem, The Third-Rate Section Chief nonetheless confirms my view that there are many more worthwhile '60s Korean films to be discovered.

Review by Kyu Hyun Kim

    Epitaph

An old doctor, circa 1979 (the year President Park Chung-hee was assassinated: Park's Japanese moniker, Takaki Masao, is the same as that of the doctor), discovers that the Ansaeng (Safe Life) Hospital, one of the most modern medical facilities in the colonial period, is about to be demolished. This sets off reminiscences of his internship days at the hospital in 1942, when he got caught up in a number of supernatural episodes. Epitaph, the debut film of the Jeong Brothers (Jeong Beom-sik and Jeong Sik -- "Jeong Brothers" is how they prefer to be listed in the credits), is a refined, intelligent and surprisingly effective Gothic horror. Well cast and acted, Epitaph is particularly notable for its close family resemblance to the slightly pale and artificial exquisiteness of certain Japanese genre films: it in fact can be favorably compared to the high-end Japanese adaptations of the willfully perverse but sparingly beautiful Edogawa Rampo mysteries (Tsukamoto Shinya's Gemini, Kawashima Toru's The Man Who Travels with Picture Relief).

Epitaph has a convoluted (but currently fashionable) multiple flashbacks-and-time lag structure, but does not devolve into a confusing mess, which is a huge relief. The story is roughly divided into three segments. In the first, the young Jeong-nam/Masao (Jin Ku, who played Jo In-sung's young punk lieutenant in Dirty Carnival) finds himself attracted to a stunning-looking young girl's dead body, allegedly a victim of a failed double suicide. The second segment, flagrantly influenced by Old Boy (it even repeats a key line of dialogue, "I love you, Ajjeossi" -- a generic Korean word for a man some years older), is a tale of Asako (Ko Joo-yeon, Blue Swallow), the only survivor of a fatal car crash. Asako is haunted by the awful ghost of her mother, and Doctor Lee (Lee Dong-gyu, Desire, To Sir with Love/Bloody Reunion), convinced that this is the working of her survivor's guilt, attempts to cure her. Finally, the hospital's surgeons Dr. Kaneda (Kim Bo-gyeong, Friend) and Dr. Kim Dong-won (Kim Tae-woo, Hypnotized, Woman on the Beach) find themselves wrapped up in some serial murders of Japanese soldiers.

In my opinion the second episode, while expertly directed and most effective as a horror film, seems to play at a different emotional pitch, and interferes with the integration of all the other elements into a coherent whole. The key to the Jeong Brothers' success is that they do not overreach: they are ambitious--aesthetically and dramaturgically--but only within the confines of a world carefully molded to retain its artifice. Unlike Black House or The Cut, there is little here that reminds one of a Hollywood blockbuster or a mainstream action thriller. In contrast, quite a few scenes evoke the milieu of an old RKO studio production or a modern Japanese theater, dressed with the state-of-the-art visual effects only when needed. Production design by Lee Min-bok, Kim Yoo-jung, Hae Jae-min and others, in its quasi-minimalist way, is impressively detailed and textured. The sound design by Lee Sang-wook also deserves mention. Yoon Nam-ju's cinematography carefully maintains the faded-photograph tone, while playing with the viewer's vision via deliberately out-of-focus visuals and other techniques.

The cast, including reliable supporting players like Kim Eung-su (a super-veteran somehow typecast as a Japanese these days) and Ye Soo-jeong (the mother in Save the Green Planet), deliver good to terrific performances for the most part. Jin Ku as the young protagonist is perhaps a little too subdued to carry the film, but Kim Tae-woo has little problem conveying the happiness, anxiety and eventual terror of a mild-mannered neurosurgeon married to a talented and devoted wife. Nonetheless their acting thunder is stolen by the ridiculously pretty Ko Joo-yeon, another Korean child actress who we dearly hope continues her film career.

While Epitaph does engage in the requisite Tale of Two Sisters-like "plot twist," it is at least done in a way that makes some sense in terms of the characters in question. Most important of all, unlike most Korean horror films of recent years, Epitaph is genuinely scary, without resorting to the usual PSC (Pointless Sadako Clones) tactics: one sequence in particular, in which Asako's dead mother, looking like a Barbie squished by a steamroller, gargles and screeches what may have been intended as a lullaby to her frightened-out-of-her-mind daughter, made me want to hide under the seat.

Epitaph, while not quite as grandiloquently entertaining as Black House, nonetheless will make a significant contribution to rehabilitating K-horror's international reputation. With this fastidious, refined yet emotionally satisfying Gothic horror piece, the Jeong Brothers have successfully proven that they are talents to watch out for in the future, their debt to Park Chan-wook notwithstanding.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

2007.07.31:  A film from North Korea: The Schoolgirl's Diary (2006)   I don't usually get the opportunity to write about North Korean films on this site, which is an unfortunate omission. I'm told that (in contrast to the past) there are now ways to access films from the North in Seoul, but I'm having such a hard time keeping up with South Korean cinema that so far I haven't pursued it. A couple weeks ago, however, I had the opportunity to watch Jang In-hak's The Schoolgirl's Diary ("Han nyeohaksaeng-ui ilgi", 2006), which was an eye-opening viewing in several respects.

North Korea made only two feature films in 2006. This one was by far the more successful, supposedly selling 8 million tickets across the country. I'm not sure to what extent box-office figures in North Korea can be trusted, but scholar Leonid Petrov, who gave a short talk before the screening, says that on a recent trip to North Korea nearly everyone he met had seen it and was happy to give an opinion on it.

Indeed, while it may strike Western viewers as a bit bland, its portrayal of young North Koreans is comparatively provocative at home -- assessments of the film were often split by age, Petrov said, with older viewers being more critical. Perhaps the most notable example is the unexpected opening shot, which is a close-up on a Mickey Mouse backpack. As the camera pulls back, we see a crowd of schoolchildren, all wearing Mickey Mouse backpacks (imported via China, we can probably assume). We are then introduced to our heroine, Su-ryeon, whose biggest goal in life appears to be to live in a modern apartment complex. A rather materialist dream, one might say.

In truth, though, Su-ryeon (played by rising star Pak Mi-hyang, pictured above) seems most upset by the lack of attention she receives from her scientist father. And understandably so -- he is so devoted to his work in the city that he barely even sees his family at all. On the rare occasions he is home, he acts in ways that frustrate or embarrass his daughter. Su-ryeon finds herself growing bitter towards her family, and unsure what to do with her own life.

This ultimately redemptive tale has received unusual attention outside of North Korea, with a Paris-based company (Pretty Pictures) buying French language rights last year after its screening at the Pyongyang Film Festival. This spring Pretty Pictures was screening the film to potential buyers at the Cannes Film Festival's market.

For me The Schoolgirl's Diary is strongly reminiscent of mainstream 1970s South Korean cinema, in its look and production values, and also in its style of storytelling. I can't say the film drew me to the edge of my seat, but it did provide a few interesting contrasts with films from the South. For one thing, I can't think of any South Korean film that contains a character quite like Su-ryeon's younger sister, a dorky tomboy soccer player who was played by a real athlete. The film's emphasis on athletics was rather interesting (in one scene, for example, Su-ryeon wins an argument with a classmate by beating her in a footrace).

One of the other people at the screening was professor Stephen Epstein of the Victoria University of Wellington. He told me that the film was consistent with something that he found in an overview of recent North Korean literature. In virtually all of the short stories he read, the main character expressed some form of doubt about life, work or society. Although they come around in the end, realizing the value of devoting their lives to the state and to the general welfare, the implication is that the public easily identifies with doubting characters of this type. You might consider it an indirect admission about the morale of ordinary North Koreans that could not be stated in direct terms.