Faces of Seoul
A documentary that is at once a city portrait of an Asian capital. It accounts the recent changes of Seoul from the perspectives of both a former local dweller with many intimate memories and an expatriate traveler whose knowledge of the city can neither be contemporary nor irrelevant.
Gina Kim
Director
Also Directed by Gina Kim
The film traces the last living moments of a real-life sex worker who was brutally murdered by a US soldier at the Dongducheon Camptown in South Korea in 1992.
In the 1970s, the Korean government required camp town women to wear number tags and Sexually Transmitted Diseases test results on their chests at all times, pressured by the US government to lower STD rates among their soldiers. The women who were suspected to have STD were locked up in a detainment center and treated with harsh doses of penicillin that resulted in severe side effects and occasional deaths.
The film is counterbalanced between two interrelated parts. The first part takes place in Los Angeles, and is centered around a Korean female student, Gah-in, who is studying in the US. She is having a sexual affair with a married man named, Jun. The second part is about Jun's wife, Do-hee, which takes place in Seoul, Korea.
When an American woman begins a dangerous relationship with an attractive immigrant worker, in order to save her marriage, she finds her true self.
Hao's Singaporean restaurant is in danger of going out of business. Hao's grandson, Mark, secretly travels to Shanghai to attend a cooking competition despite his grandfather's wishes for him to become an engineer. Mark takes the place of a contestant who did not show up and must now impress the host, Julia Lee, and her chef husband, David Chen. Chen, who is originally from Singapore and misses his family, eventually learns he is Mark's father.
FROM WIkipedia: In 1995, upon moving to the United States for her MFA, Kim began shooting Gina Kim’s Video Diary. In it, Kim realizes a vision of the modern female nomad—one who travels fluidly not only between Asia and America, but between multiple languages, film genres, and personal, local and cinematic histories. Screened at the Berlin Film Festival, Gina Kim’s Video Diary was described in the catalogue as “an extremely personal account of one' woman's fears, fantasies and projections” that “provides the viewer with an unusual self-portrait that is deeply unsettling, moving and life-affirming," and now it is frequently cited as a classic in the genre of personal documentaries.
