[KS] 5th Korean Film Festival in Iowa City

[yung-kwak at uiowa.edu]

Welcome to the 5th Korean Film Festival(April 23rd-25th)!

For the past 5 years, Kolors has presented an intriguing, sometimes 
provocative collection of contemporary Korean films to not only Iowans but 
also some fervent Midwest filmgoers outside Iowa, and thereby is now an 
irreplaceable event in Iowa. 

To our joy, during the same period, Korean Cinema began receiving its long 
overdue international recognition; Im Kwon-Taek and Lee Chang-Dong have won 
the prestigious award for Best Director respectively at the Cannes Film 
Festival in 2002 and at the Venice Film Festival in the same year. And most 
recently, Kim Ki-Duk won the Silver Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival 
this year, the equivalent to the aforementioned award for Best Director. 


In further uplifting this upbeat spirit, this year’s festival will be filled 
with even more exciting films, including notably, Im Kwon-Taek’s highly 
enjoyable- yet rarely seen abroad- action film [General’s Son](1990) in 
gorgeous 35mm print! We’re also excited to announce that special talks will be 
given by top-notch film scholars- Jung Bong Choi (UC, Santa Barbara), Frances 
Gateward (U. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign), and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (NYU) on 
contemporary Korean and Japanese cinema on Saturday afternoon (4:30PM, 
4.24.04). 

In line with the theme of this year’s festival, that is, to look at how 
contemporary Korean and Japanese cinemas remember each other, or, in 
particular, the colonial memory as such,* we have gathered various films 
ranging from documentaries ([The Murmuring], [In the Name of the Emperor]), 
historical comedies ([YMCA Baseball Team]), science-fiction ([2009 Lost 
Memories]) to military thrillers ([Phantom, The Submarine]). Also worth noting 
here is [815 (Hachi-Ichi-Go)], an intriguing Japanese film by Chugoku Shoichi, 
which was premiered last fall at the Vancouver International Film Festival and 
won Special Mention for its provocative depiction of contemporary Japan. 


Though none of the films should not be missed, I would strongly recommend for 
the general audiences and families to watch [YMCA Baseball Team] on Friday 
night (8:00); [General’s Son] for film students and scholars or anyone who 
heard about Im Kwon-Taek and who doesn’t want to miss this rare and unique 
chance to see Im Kwon-Taek’s action film given his now established status as 
an artistic director; [The Murmuring] for those who want to see ‘in person,’ 
if you will, how colonial memory remains as ‘the present pasts’ not only for 
Koreans but also for Japanese; [815] for those who’d like to approach the 
issue from a totally different point of view and are stoic enough to bear with 
the silent yet definitely far from a serene intermission that will last 
exactly for 8 minutes and 15 seconds during the screening. 


Well, now you can’t wait until next weekend? Then, visit our website for more 
information on the festival and films (http://www.digitdream.com/kolors) and 
leave your own trace on the message board. 

I’ll see you ALL next weekend!


Kwak Yung-Bin

Executive Programming Director of
Korean Film Festival at University of Iowa (3rd~)

Ph.D. Student, Film Studies
Dept. of Cinema and Comparative Literature
University of Iowa
H) 319-353-4894
C) 319-530-5104


* This event is made possible by the generous funds
  provided by:

  Center for Asian Pacific Studies (CAPS)
  Institute for Cinema and Culture (ICC)
  International Programs (IP)
  International Writing Program (IWP)

  For a full list of sponsors, check our website.

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5th Korean Film Festival at the University of Iowa

Far Away So Close: 
The Present Pasts in Contemporary Korean
And Japanese Cinema

Schedule

Date            Time            Program
April 23rd (Fri)5:00PM          [2009 Lost Memories] (2002)
                8:00PM          [YMCA Baseball Team] (2003)

April 24th (Sat)11:00AM         [The Murmuring] (1994)
                2:00 PM         [815 (Hachi-Ichi-Go)] (2003)
                4:30PM          Public Symposium on
                                Korean and Japanese Cinema with

                                Jung-Bong Choi
                                (U. of California, Santa Barbara)
                                Frances Gateward
                                (U. of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
                                Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (NYU)

                7:30PM          Im Kwon-Taek’s [General’s Son] (1990)

April 25th (Sun)2:00PM          [In the Name of the Emperor] (1995)
                3:30PM          [Phantom, The Submarine] (1999)

* Note: All screenings are at 101 BCSB
 (Becker’s Communication Studies Building) 


JUNG-BONG CHOI is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of 
California at Santa Barbara. His works interweave sociological paradigms with 
critical and cultural theories. His interests include the political economy of 
globalization, postmodern humanity in digital media, and post-colonial 
cultural geography in East Asia. He was the organizer of an International 
conference titled "Unsettling East Asia, Interrogating Communication" in 2001. 
His works have been published in Social Identities, Journal of International 
Communication, and Journal of Communication Inquiry. He is currently co-
editing a book dedicated to contemporary Japanese television.

FRANCES GATEWARD is an Associate Professor of Unit for Cinema Studies and the 
Program in Comparative and World Literature, Affiliate in the Afro-American 
Studies and Research Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana 
Champaign. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland College 
Park. Her areas of research are African American film and popular culture, 
post-colonial film, and Korean cinema. She is the editor of Zhang Yimou: 
Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), co-editor of Sugar, Spice, 
and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood (Wayne State University, 2002) and 
notably Korean Cinema (Oxford Press, 2004).

MITSUHIRO YOSHIMOTO is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at New 
York University. The fields of his specialization are film studies and 
critical theory. He has an MA in film studies from the University of 
California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the 
University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the book Kurosawa: 
Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2000), which is 
acclaimed by Fredric Jameson as “a grand performance sustained by a voice of 
rare authority,” and numerous articles in English and Japanese on Japanese 
film, television, Hollywood cinema, postmodernism, among others.