UCLA Archive brings Korean cultural films to American audience

President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” includes a
country torn by politics but connected through heritage as an
industrialized South Korea mourns its northern communist
counterpart, a remnant of the Cold War.

“It’s very hard to communicate with North Koreans,
but there’s been progress,” said Rick Phillips,
cultural liaison of the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

That progress can be seen in its films, which deal with issues
such as the North-South division and the repression Koreans face.
The UCLA Archive is at the forefront of bringing Korean films to
American audiences, a 20-year tradition that will continue with
tonight’s opening of the “Seoul Cinema” screening
series at the James Bridges Theater.

Among others, the archive hosted the U.S. premiere of
“Shiri,” a lauded action film about spies and espionage
between North and South Korea. While that film was picked up for
distribution, many of the films do not get national attention and
remain within the film festival or college circuit.

“What a university allows is the ability to be adventurous
and take risks when there’s no financial return because our
mandate is to enrich the cultural life of L.A.,” said
Cheng-Sim Lim, co-head of public programming at the UCLA
Archive.

“Whether a film gets picked up by a distributor or not is
no indication of worth,” Lim said. “Lots of times there
are fantastic films that are being made that don’t get picked
up because they think that they can’t make money.”

Indeed, cultural enrichment comes at a price, and luckily the
UCLA Archive has the KCC to foot part of the bill. The KCC is run
by the consulate of the South Korean government, and they are
generous in a country where arts funding is limited.

“We are very reliant on partners that fund everything that
we do,” Lim said. “It’s a relationship
that’s existed ever since we started showing Korean films in
the 1980s.”

In addition, some of the film’s directors will be going to
the screenings. Lee Jung-hyang may attend the screening of his
“The Way Home,” an intimate drama which, nonetheless,
made box office waves in Korea (beating out “Lord of the
Rings”) and got picked up by Paramount Classics. Song Il-gon
will attend the screening of his film “Flower Island,”
which critiques the cultural oppression of women in Korea through
the subjectivity of three women.

Korean culture can be very repressive, a topic explored most
humorously through Margaret Cho’s imitations of her mother.
Korean films of late have taken up this thread of repression and
criticized it in an unprecedented way.

“There’s a change going on in terms of the critique
of gender roles and patriarchal institutions in Korean films in the
last two years,” Lim said. “It’s not that
that’s not been the case, but in the last two years
you’ve seen more and more examples of this
critique.”

“Koreans have had a tough history,” Phillips added.
“They have very strict ethic codes based on Confucianism.
There is a lot of repression, and the films help purge that
out.”