Korean Documentary Film Festival
March 29-31, 2007

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Family Project: House of a Father
Jo Yun-kyung, 52 min., 2002
Thursday, March 29, 7 – 9 pm
English Building, Rm 160

Screening followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Jo Yun-kyung, University of Florida-Gainesville, and Professor of Folklore Roger Janelli, Indiana University

In this portrait of a “typical” Korean family in crisis, a father fixated on his role as the head of the household and a mother regretting a life of self-sacrifice are confronted by their grown children. The director offers a personal examination of a Korean middle-class family in transition. The director’s relentless and painful exploration of her own family pushes the audience to reflect on their experience of family life as well as to engage in larger questions of the meaning of family in Korean society.

Shocking Family
Kyung Soon, 115 min., 2006
Friday, March 30, 12:30 – 3:00 pm (Korea Workshop)
Transportation Building, Rm 103

Screening followed by a discussion with Jo Yun-kyung, University of Florida-Gainesville, and Roger Janelli, Indiana University

Shocking Family questions “family” as a fundamental unit of Korean society by examining the lives of members of the documentary film crew: camerawoman Seyoung, a single woman in her twenties; still photographer Kyungeun, a recent divorcee in her thirties; director Kyungsoon, in her forties, living with her teenage daughter; and English tutor Vincent, a Korean-American adoptee, who offers a scathing critique of the Korean sense of “bloodline.” All try to create a new network of friends that transcend the confines of their families.

Lunch will be included. To sign up for this workshop, please contact Lucretia Williams at 333-7273 or email lawillia@uiuc.edu

Repatriation
Kim Dong-won, director, 149 min., 2003
Friday, March 30, 7 – 9:30 pm English Building, Rm 160

More than ten years in the making, this film follows several released North Korean prisoners who had been captured by South Korea years earlier for espionage as they both struggle to adapt to South Korean society and campaign to be repatriated to North Korea. Repatriation broke South Korean box-office records for a documentary when it was released in 2004 and was voted the best film of the past decade in 2004 by 100 Korean film critics and reporters.

Educator Workshop: North and South Korean Relations:
Teaching with the Film Repatriation
Saturday, March 31, 10:00am – 12:00pm (pre-registration required)
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Building
Humanities Lecture Hall

Nan Youngnan Kim-Paik, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Jacques Fuqua, UIUC

Open to secondary and post-secondary educators, this free workshop will provide an introduction to current relations between North and South Korea, both on the political and human scales. The workshop will include an opportunity to discuss Friday evening’s screening of Repatriation and the presenters will place it in context.

For more information and to register, click here.

 

Last Updated March 20, 2007