Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club: Bong Joon-ho's Beginnings

The greatest artists don't necessarily come out of the academy: Shakespeare didn't go to college. Nor did Basquiat. Nor did Beverly Sills. As for movie director Bong Joon-ho, he may have been enrolled at Yonsei University but his major was Sociology, not Cinema Studies. For his education in his chosen artform, Bong credits the Yellow Door Film Club, a ragtag group of cinephile students who pirated classic movies on VHS and put out their own humble version of Cahiers du cinema. Bong was a member. So was Lee Hyuk-rae -- the director of Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club -- who has graciously orchestrated a heartwarming virtual reunion 30 years after the group's demise.

Three decade is a long time but the Yellow Door Film Club clearly had a lasting impact on all its participants, not just those who went on to become directors like Bong, Lee, and Choi Jong-tae or actors like Woo Hyeon and Ahn Nae-sang. Whether they're describing the viewing of Bong's stop-motion short Looking for Paradise or the pirating of classic VHS tapes like Raging Bull, Breathless, and Bicycle Thief, each former club member clearly sees their time with the Yellow Door as a cherished period of their lives. No one glorifies their part in this shared experience. To the contrary, they giddily poke fun at their youthful pretensions and marvel at their scrappy can-do spirit. The collective ethos that informed their efforts may do much to explain why they all look back at the Yellow Door with such fondness. For me, Lee's documentary is more than a portrait of Bong's indie roots. It's also a tribute to those instances during which nerds come together to share a passion and an obsession, without shame.

The Grace Lee Project: She's All That

Nice. Smart. Quiet. These are the most common adjectives used to describe Grace Lee. But which Grace Lee are we talking about? Seemingly all of them. In Grace Lee's giddily entertaining documentary The Grace Lee Project, one Asian American female stereotype gets demonstrated and debunked, upended and celebrated as the movie's intrepid, globehopping narrator interviews a series of women who happen to share her given name. It's oddly fascinating. And impossibly charming. You see, Lee, the filmmaker, can't escape the cliches as she vacilates between searching for points of connection and points of distinction. Instead she abandons the self-reflective, introspective query "Who am I?" for the outward looking question, "Who are you?" Her escalating curiosity is contagious.

Because in some weird way Grace Lee could be anybody: the newscaster in Hawaii; the Detroit social activist fighting the good fight at 88 years old; the preacher's wife; the preacher's kid; the hearing-impaired mother who escapes an abusive household of white, adoptive parents to go on and rescue a friend and that woman's three children from a similar cycle of domestic abuse. There's also — much less visibily — a cruiseship cabaret chanteuse, a panicked teen who sets fire to her high school, and a former lesbian organizer in South Korea who wants to disappear so as not to upset her parents. How much does one's name influences one's identity? And what if our differences somehow draw us together instead of pull us apart? Quirky and spirited, The Grace Lee Project starts off as preposterous but ends up profound.

The Flesh-Witness: The Mark of Colonialism

Installation artist Kyuri Jeon's The Flesh-Witness is one of those short experimental documentaries that packs the punch of a feature-length film. The movie is built in part around Korean War footage sourced from the United States' NARA (National Archives and Records Administration). This seems worth mentioning because the clips are so damning regarding America's role during that conflict that I doubt that the current administration would allow such images to be released. Specifically, The Flesh-Witness recounts the enforced tattooing of Korean P.O.W.s with anti-communist messages as a way to spread pro-capitalist propaganda and make a return to North Korea untenable for the soldiers.

Watching scenes of often shirtless young men being disinfected and shorn prior to getting tattooed calls to mind atrocities like Auschwitz and Dachau. But unlike WWII, the Korean War isn't the story of Yankee rescuers, despite how some history books have tried to spin it. The Flesh-Witness reminds us that what brought American troops to the 38th latitude wasn't the liberation of the country from Japanese occupation but rather a fear that communism would take hold in this East Asian country which was being helped by Russia and China. Neo-colonialism and xenophobia, white supremacy and capitalist imperialism were the driving forces for General MacArthur and company who literally branded those with more personal allegiances once victory was at hand. Shameful.

This Is Korea!: No, This Is Propaganda!

There's something revolting about pretending the worse thing that happened to Korea in the 20th century was communism when the Chinese and Soviets were actually responsible for combatting Japanese occupation. But such is the myth-making of John Ford's This Is Korea!, an agit-prop film produced by the U.S Navy that's really more about American soldiers abroad than the citizens they're supposedly protecting. We hear of men from New York, Georgia, Maine, Idaho, and California; soldiers who haven't had a hot meal in two months come Christmas; fighters trekking across the hills while carrying their homes upon their backs; "...walking when they still can; carried when they can't."

What we hear about the Koreans is that they are refugees in their own country (a curious choice of words!), getting vaccines for typhus and smallpox (which they don't understand) and primarily homeless children taken care of by local nuns. More time is devoted to seeing bazookas in action and tanks and grenades and flame-throwers. Was there a time when people saw the weaponry and thought, "How cool is that?" Were people charmed by an orphan named Little Babe Ruth DiMaggio and moved by a silver star pinned on a uniformed chest followed by footage of napalm being dropped? It's tough to hear the narrator mispronounce the capital city or mutter "Fry 'em out, burn 'em out, cook 'em" and believe that Ford and company care about the Korean people at all in relationship to this war. Delusional, demented, Red scare cinema at its worst? Mission accomplished. What are they fighting for? As the film itself states: "Maybe it's just pure cussedness."

Black Gospel: Harlem Gets Seoul

Ostensibly about a cadre of Koreans who learn to sing Gospel at the genre's NYC wellspring in Harlem, the documentary Black Gospel contrarily testifies that you can't master a culturally-rooted music experiencing a single month of immersion. As choirmaster Dr. Reverend Ouida W. Harding asks bluntly after hearing one earnest singer during orientation, "What are you doing?" And by that, she means "What are you doing here? What are you singing? Why are you singing? Why are you wasting my time?" As each member of the fish-out-of-water choir steps forward to warble, this non-nonsense minister — the true star of Black Gospel — eviscerates each quavering tourist, one by one — American Idol-style. The single exception, Yang Dong-kun a.k.a. YDG, meets with some approval because he's got heart despite an inability to hit the exact notes.

The lesson the Reverend is hell-bent on teaching is this: Singing "perfect" is not gospel's point. Church music comes with a message and anyone belting "Amazing Grace" or "I Just Want to Praise You" better have a passion for spreading The Word. The visiting vocalists' other preacher-teachers are infinitely kinder but the gravitation toward the lightest skin music director and a white orchestrator does make the heart ache. The culminating concert doesn't invoke the spirit via an overlong chorus of "Lean on Me," but this little doc does give witness to gospel's undying appeal. Praise it.

News of Seoul: Three Minutes of Yesteryear

When it opened it 2015, Kyoto's Toy Film Museum was a humble institution, displaying historic cameras and bygone home projectors in a wall of cubbyholes. (There was also some toy audiovisual equipment with which visitors could play.) Screenings of old samurai movies were shown on a television, the guest speaker might be a screenwriter of yore. But just being a movie archive does position one to make discoveries. And so here we are as TFM's Director Oto Yoneo donates this bit of footage (dating back to the 1920s) to the Korean Film Archive circa 2019. If you're a Korean movie buff like me, then you know full well that homegrown celluloid prior to 1950 is precious goods indeed as the occupying Japanese were actively engaged in destroying Korean culture/art in all forms from 1910 up through the Korean war. How this particular snippet survived (on enemy territory, no less) is a bit of a mystery!

As for the footage itself, which lasts but a few minutes, there are street scenes with trolley cars and brief, overhead shots of Seoul's early skyline, devoid of skyscrapers, Namsan Tower, Lotte World, and the National Museum with its memorable modern spin on traditional architecture. Everything you see is scratched and marked up; the sound — if there ever was any — is long lost; and the title cards — like some of the in situ street signage — are in... Japanese. Still it's nice to get this glimpse of the past, no matter how damaged, no matter how mute.

Shadow Flowers: There's No Place Like Home

North Korean defectors' harrowing escapes are well-documented. But what about those who wish to return? That less-common tale is rarely told. Which is exactly what makes Yi Seung-un's Shadow Flowers — which had its North American premiere in MoMA's Doc Fortnight — so curious. This feature-length documentary concerns Kim Ryun-hee, a decidedly tenacious woman who left North Korea in search of better medical treatment only to find herself trapped in South Korea unable to return. She certainly leaves no stone unturned: She brands herself a spy, engages in passive resistance, attempts suicide, holds press conferences, seeks assistance from the Vietnamese consulate, and networks with fellow ex-pats. Yet time and again, her effort to get back to her husband and daughter is met with bureaucratic delays. Even her renegade act of connecting with North Korean players at a good will hockey game is met with a wall of yellow-vested bodies that prevent her from making physical contact of any kind.

Over seven years in, government leadership may have experienced drastic upheavals in Seoul but Kim consistently appears no closer to success than she did when she arrived. "The kitchen appliances are better," Rhee quips at one point about South Korea but she also notes that her totalitarian regime had free healthcare, reasonable work hours, and built-in retirement plans. When she argues with a lone older protestor about dictator Kim Jong-un, the man-on-the-street's reply is "Go back to your own country" to which she responds: "I can't." After that, somewhat bewildered, he comments, "I need a smoke" then puts down his protest sign. Perhaps Yi's film can pick up where Kim's enemies left off.

Tiger Spirit: The Korean Peninsular at the Crossroads

The sad truth is that every documentary that touches on Japan's occupation of Korea makes me aware of yet another atrocity committed by the Japanese. This time, in Lee Min Sook's Tiger Spirit, I learned that the Japanese government made it their mission to kill all the tigers in Korea because it was the animal that Koreans identified with their fighting spirit. Anyone read that post I wrote last year about The Tiger? Well, apparently, the movie's not just some man-versus-nature metaphor. It's based on the reality of deranged oppressors murdering an entire animal species as a way to subjugate a people. Not that we're guiltless in America, where white cops shoot black civilians without repercussions and the Native Americans are screwed without the least remorse. You know, when I was a kid I used to have a dream in which the animals were waiting for us to get with the program for some planetary peace program and an owl told me how upset he was that humans were not partaking of the larger inter-species conversation and instead were just killing. Still true, even if I'm not eight years old.

As to the rest of the Lee's movie, though, the whimsical yet intrepid director becomes engrossed with her birthplace's Berlin Wall — the Korean Demilitarized Zone — especially in regards to to how this great divide relates to identity and family. A South-Korean born filmmaker raised in Canada, Lee finds in the fractured country a shared sense of dislocation. Her documentation of the staged reunions orchestrated by the North and South quietly sheds light on an irreparable rift that some hour-long meetings in a tourist trap can't possibly bridge. Her recounting of North Korean escapees' newfound woes is equally elucidating. These relocated relatives from up North are subjected to insidious demands by their new homeland, like a lifelong parole officer, lavish weddings that demand you perform your rites for the public online, and jobs at museums that badmouth your birthplace. As homecomings go, it's not ideal. Watching Lee trudge through forests while three months pregnant or lugging her three-month-old newborn around during a return trip for additional footage, you realize home is everywhere and nowhere. We're all orphans in a way. Heaven help us!

Making Noise in Silence: School Pictures

The subject of Mina T. Son's mini-documentary is a pair of South Korean-born students at an American high school for the deaf. We learn only snippets about them: He's a valedictorian senior who wrestles and works on the yearbook; she's a junior working on a large colorful mural in one hallway, an artist-in-the-making who can hear somewhat with the help of a cochlear implant. It's a strange little film in that, since it only lasts 20 minutes, you never get a sense of the school culture outside of brief scenes in the cafeteria, the gymnasium, and the classroom. Their home lives, split between weekdays in the dorms and weekends at home if you live nearby, is similarly only glimpsed. Yet how much is learned in these brief moments.

One senses great divides between the young man and his parents who he communicates to on the phone via a human translator who either simplifies what his parents are saying or is sharing some fairly detached reactions to his acceptance into Gallaudet. Similarly, the young woman feels reluctant to hear her relatives at home where neither her aunt or her mother are ever shown signing as a way to communicate. You get the feeling that there's a tremendous amount of effort being put into getting these kids a proper education on one hand and also a reluctance to bridge the world into which they're being propelled. (It's worth noting that the young woman's dad has returned to Korea because he didn't like the United States.)

Given the relative brevity of the film, it's preposterous to truly conclude anything about the school, the parents, the two teenagers... And Making Noise in Silence isn't actually out to make any definitive statements either. But as a prompt for a discussion on deaf culture, I'd say it was pretty effective.

My Love, Don't Cross That River: Old Feelings

She's 88. He's 98. They've been married for 74 years and he's now got a cough that sounds like death (which it is). But before he goes to the other side, Jin Mo-young's unabashedly sentimental documentary My Love, Don't Cross That River reveals the secret behind this beyond-golden marriage as the two geezers throw leaves at each other, throw snow at each other, and throw water at each other or walk around in matching outfits. Life is playtime! There are moments of true tenderness, like when Jo Byeong-man strokes his sleeping wife's head at night after he wakes up in the wee hours or when Kang Gye-yeol teases a newborn puppy to go over to "grandpa" to give him a lick. Some of it feels staged; some of the dialogue sounds prompted by having a camera nearby. Yet even so, you can tell these two people are soulmates so any skepticism about geriatric love is quickly left at the door of one of the two doghouses outside the country home (where a pair of small dogs named Freebie and Kiddo are chained up cruelly, if ignorantly so).

Though you don't see much of the offspring, you do get a glimpse of them at a New Year's celebration and then at a birthday party. Like any family, some of the kids are cool; some seem insufferable; some make their parents cry. From what I could tell, that generation almost universally dyes its hair. To be honest, they all seem irrelevant. My Love, Don't Cross That River really is about a love between two people to the exclusion of everyone else — the doctors, the nurses, the other bus-riders from the senior center, the children, the grandchildren, the neighbor with the ugly dog, the unseen filmmaker... It's as if this love could only survive on the mountain if everyone just left the perfect pair alone. Naturally she wants to join her beloved in the great beyond as soon as possible. There's no one else worth sticking around for. And — spoiler alert — one of the dogs is dead.

The Red Chapel: Kim Jong-il's Comedy Club

The Red Chapel a.k.a. Kim Jong-il's Comedy Club has got to be the weirdest, funniest, most disturbing documentary about North Korea because it so clearly displays the grievous shortcomings of the hermit nation as well as its critics. On the Korean side, you've got a totalitarian regime, a populace terrified into crying and laughing on cue, a capitol city that's a questionably functional theme park, an institutionalized xenophobia that turns potential cultural exchange into pure propaganda, and an abhorrence for the differently abled that manifests in their complete invisibility (at best). On the Western side, you've got a kind of flippancy towards injustice, a know-it-all attitude that attempts to bully others into submission, a self-aware mocking of the rules that doesn't realize that "playing fascist" is "being fascist" regardless of intent, an exploitation of the handicapped, and a biased misinterpretation of history that sidesteps the pain experienced by the oppressed.

You may say that the crimes of North Korea are worse than those of the West but they're both pretty damning. What saves your sense of humanity are the two Danish comics — of Korean descent — who undermine both the rigidity of the country they're visiting and the misguided manhandling of their misguided but well-meaning manager Mads Brugger. Simon Jul Jorgensen, a big bear of a performer, takes a wily approach to the proceedings. He's along for the ride but he also isn't afraid to establish parameters as to what he will and won't do. Jacob Nossell has a harder time of it. A self-described spastic, he senses a hate beneath the niceties of his guides/hosts and struggles to find a way to be compassionate even as he's smothered by his assigned attache who embodies a mad confusion of affection and rigidity. As the spokesperson of pain internalized and witnessed, Nossell stands amid the chaos like a lone Cassandra, able to see what's wrong with this picture but uttering his insights to deaf ears. Like to laugh with discomfort? You've found the right movie.

South Korea: Success at All Costs: No Critical Thinking

There's something irresponsible and upsetting about the hour-long documentary South Korea: Success at All Costs for while directors Barbara Necek and Aline Hoorpah definitely presents damning evidence about pet cloning, plastic surgery, long work hours, charlatan shamans, abandonment of the elderly, and staggering suicide rates (the highest in the world), all these facts are dropped amid an endless list of success stories that sabotage in asides. What's the point of hearing that one young man has eyelid surgery in order to improve his chances of getting a good job then learning a few months later that he still doesn't have that job if you're going to end it with "It's just a matter of time before he gets it"? Why claim to get unique access to a factory town, a town in which every aspect is owned by the company — schools, apartments, stores — if your guide is a stooge employee speaking as if from a company script? How can you show clips of people jumping off a bridge (quite possibly to their deaths) as little more than interstitial content?

Is it that Nacek and Hoorpah had to get institutional sign-off so that they could use much of this footage? Are they intentionally subverting a propaganda film by striking one jarringly cheery tone then constantly sounding the note of discord? Is this cinematic sarcasm? Whatever these two are trying to do, it didn't work for me. South Korea: Success at All Costs is a missed opportunity to celebrate what South Korea is doing right, where they've gone wrong, and how the two overlap. Missing as well: any thoughtful examination of international cultural influencers like K-pop, K-drama, and Korean cinema. They would've been wise to dig deeper instead of simply presenting a mixed message, as if culling facts from warring pamphleteers. The additional choice to layer on a British-accented voice-over instead of simply adding subtitles to the Korean speakers was also a grave mistake, although likely not one made by the co-directors themselves.

Factory Complex: She Works Hard for Little Money

The exploitation of women in the workplace is hardly something new. We've all seen Norma Rae at this point and we all know about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire tragedy. Or at least, we should! Yet this harsh reality of second-classing the second sex is hardly restricted to the American workplace. In the deservedly prize-winning Factory Complex, director Im Heung-soon zooms in on the systemic mistreatment and abuse of the female labor force, an ongoing oppression that's playing out not just in South Korea but also in countries where South Korean companies have taken root. And while the documentary definitely has firm roots in the garment industry, with testimonials of textile workers from both the homeland and further afield, it also broadens the scope of its inquiry — or better yet, its condemnation — of the sexism, misogyny, and utter human disregard to include air line workers, call center operators, and even check-out clerks.

Please understand, this isn't Harlan County USA or Roger and Me. For while Factory Complex definitely has its grit and its devastating details, the film also has an unapologetic artiness. (It screened at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and you can't get much artier than that.) As much a creative as a chronicler, Im can't resist adding surreal interstitials — two cloaked female heads sharing unheard secrets; an expanse of black wig invading a section the grocery store. Are they weird? Yes. Do they get in the way of the larger story? Not really. Plus, once you've seen laborers being gunned down in Cambodia simply for staging a protest as they fight for better wages, you know your sympathies lie with Im as an artist-activist, quirks and all. Equality now! Equal rights, equal pay! The future is female!

As Shirley Chisolm once said, "In the end, anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — anti-humanism."

Across Land, Across Sea: A Family of Defectors

Songgook escaped from North Korea as a teenager. His eventual wife Sueryun and her mother also escaped across the Tumen River into China, although his mother-in-law was eventually captured and sold off to a Chinese rural farmer. Having married the former, he seeks to liberate the latter... and then shortly thereafter, with the help of his church, seeks to free additional members of her family including her brother, her aunt, and a couple of cousins. If that doesn't constitute a very good husband, I don't know what does. Come to think of it Across Land, Across Sea, the short documentary that chronicles his rescue efforts feels a bit like a home movie. It has its slow stretches and its gripping moments, its repetitive chunks and its touching scenes — and all of it is connected by the spirit of devotion.

Directed in part by journalist Lee Hark-joon, this short documentary is like one of those long personal biographical features in the Sunday paper in which you learn lots of details about a kind of Everyman doing remarkable things in a fairly humble manner. You also hear strange bits that aren't delved into too deeply — like how North Korean defectors are sequestered for six months to make sure they aren't spies and, probably, undergo deprogramming. You also wonder where the church is getting the funds to rent out multiple boats capable of sailing into international waters far from the coast. Are Songgook's escapades an isolated case? It hardly seems likely.

Yet he's a pretty remarkable man, working long hours doing construction and other odd jobs. And speaking of devotion, respect should be paid to filmmaker Lee as well who spent five years covering North Korean defectors by living among them in China. Because it's focused on one simple working-class family, Across Land, Across Sea doesn't have the scope of The Defector: Escape From North Korea or the art world glamor of I Am Sun Mu, but the perils are real; the struggle, laudable; and the tale, no less worthy of telling.

The Juchee Idea: Film as Conceptual Art, Perhaps

What was director Jim Finn's intent when he was making The Juchee Idea? Was it to make a sly documentary about filmmaker Lee Jung Yoon's time as a visiting artist at a commie communal farm well outside Pyongyang? Was it to illustrate the theoretical ideas outlined in dictator Kim Jong-il's On the Art of the Cinema? Was it to satirize the North Korean view of Western culture by way of a series of stiffly executed dialogues representing capitalist and socialist "uses" of the English language? Maybe the answer is yes to all of the above. I'm not sure. What I do know is that the various pieces neither stick together nor comment on each other so much as they all seem to coexist independently. In a way, The Juchee Idea feels like a cut-up. Finn definitely has some cool archival footage, an odd performance art sensibility, and access to what look to be entertaining North Korean films. What he's missing is a narrative through line. Maybe he never intended to have one.

By far the most fascinating parts of Finn's amalgamated movie are those sections which split-screen footage from a handful of North Korean propaganda films (such as hard-to-find titles like An Urban Girls Gets Married and Girls From My Hometown) with quotes from Kim's very intriguing film theory book. But the documentary footage of Lee being interviewed by interdisciplinary artist Daniela Kostova is shot in a way that has left me unsure of how seriously or satirically to take it. Same for the brief scenes of the "indicative conversations" — featuring an especially affected performance from Oleg Mavromatti. It's not quite funny so much as bizarre. The film kindly clocks in at sixty minutes so you're unlikely to get bored as Finn switches genres, tones, and storylines. But you're unlikely to get enlightened into the actual Juchee idea — which is North Korea's philosophy of self-reliance spiked with Marxism.

Korean Grindhouse has a page devoted exclusively to North Korean movies — both documentaries about the country and films that were created there. Check it out!

The Great Courses: The World's Greatest Churches: Two Churches in Seoul, Korea

SUNY Professor William R. Cook, who has his doctorate in medieval studies, likes to talk about churches. A lot. As in 24 lectures worth of pontificating about churches — from the Hagia Sophia to Chartres Cathedral to St. Peter's Basilica. So what two churches does he wrap up his series with on behalf of The Great Courses? A pair by 20th century architect Kim Swoo-geun, who's also responsible for designing the Seoul Olympic Stadium from 1977. What are they like? Pretty modern. The first, Kyungdong Presbyterian Church (1980), was designed for the largest Christian denomination in South Korea (which has more Presbyterians than the USA) and features a red brick exterior cloaked in ivy and an asymmetrical cement interior where the only source of natural light comes from the skylight above the altar. The second, Bulgwang-dong Catholic Church (1985), furthers many ideas of the former. The required walk around the church to its entrance (intended to encourage a more meditative frame of mind) is now accompanied by bas relief sculptures representing the stations of the cross; the interior, while also cement, is lighter and includes a burial site (behind the altar) for select former members of the congregation.

Cook clearly has an enthusiasm for his subject but he also wastes the last third of his talk on the diversity of the Christian population and how devoted he is to his own humble church in the states. I personally would've preferred he'd spent that time on how these churches related to Kim's secular designs as well as the earlier Yangdeok Catholic Church in Masan, which was constructed the year before the aforementioned Presbyterian one. I also would've welcomed knowing more about St. Andrew Kim's story. A sculpture of this Korean martyr — the nation's first Catholic saint — stands on the street-side of Bulgwang-dong Catholic Church near a sculpture of Jesus with a prominent bleeding heart. As a gesture of respect to those two at least, couldn't someone have ironed Professor Cook's pants?

Spirits and Syncretism in Korean Myth: And Now for a Lecture

Educational television. You don't hear those two words bandied about too much anymore except when Congress is talking about defunding PBS. Sure there are documentaries on Netflix, Amazon and their ilk but they tend towards big personalities, monumental events, or very personal narratives. But what about if you simply want to learn something (as opposed to being entertained by reality)? The internet, endlessly championed as a rich library, has proven itself to be a bit of a junk shop in which you might stumble upon something of quality if you're lucky and can avoid falling into a pop cultural sinkhole. Maybe there's something on Kanopy, the streaming service of the New York Public Library. I decided to find out. Today's little nugget: "Spirits and Syncretism in Korean Myth," Episode 4 of Great Mythologies of the World Course 4 - Asia and the Pacific. Pretty interesting material.

This is basically a half-hour lecture in which Beloit College's Chair of Asian Studies and History, one Professor Robert Andre LaFleur, paces back and forth across a Persian carpet in an impossibly big, strategically decorated study and speaks to various cameras if for no other reason than to pull him from one end of the room to the other. And yet "Spirits and Syncretism" isn't boring or laughable. LaFleur is the department chair for a reason and his talk on Korean mythology — from the Samguk Yusa to the tale of the Herdboy and the Weaving Maiden and onward — is filled with fascinating bits and asides like Korea's scholarly relationship to the Chinese written language (an Eastern equivalent of the West's Latin and Greek) and how living in a land where only twenty percent is agriculturally cultivable impacted one country's worldview. Korean Shamanism may get short shrift in LaFleur's virtual lecture hall but as an introduction to Korean anthropology, "Spirits and Syncretism" certainly leaves you ready and eager for Professor LaFleur's next class. Or his next video as it were. If there were one.

Wedding Through Camera Eyes: Unreal Celebrations

Most newlyweds like to take photos (and shoot video) while gaily frolicking on their exotic honeymoon. Look at us! We're having the time of our lives! And we've got the pictures to prove it! But what if the picture-taking component became the whole point of these trips? What if the photographs and DVDs became the purpose of the entire experience? Such is the case in Wedding Through Camera Eyes, a bizarre documentary about a trio of Korean weddings for which staged documentation becomes a ceremony in and of itself.

In the first segment, a fiance and fiancee are put into a variety of costumes and settings intended to evoke an idealized romance for their photo album and commemorative video. The photographer — who's actually pretty good — and the videographer — who's frankly not — direct the engaged couple to kiss, to smile, to tilt their head, to redirect their gazes, to laugh on cue. The groom-to-be describes the experience as if he were an actor in a movie. And he's right. This is a performance above all else. Congratulations are due!

The second segment revolves around an elaborate wedding incorporating period costumes and all-but-forgotten rituals, followed by a grand Western-style ceremony (with a lot of empty chairs). The bride claims that she's learning about different traditions — like the feeding of taffy to female in-laws — but her understanding feels superficial at best. I don't know that the groom learned anything at all. Frankly, this is probably the least interesting of the minisodes.

Where the movie kicks into weird overdrive is with the final section: Here are young couple are part of a newlywed party that tours a resort island where they travel by bus from photo op to photo op, happily posing (and drinking) along the way. Interviewed afterwards, they talk about this constructed reality as if it were truly a happier time when we already know it's really a facsimile of happiness. Chilling? In a way. It would be much creepier though if the cinematography were better throughout.

Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women: Japanese Denials

Going into writer-director Dai Sil Kim-Gibson's saddening doc Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, I already knew a little bit about the systematic mass sexual enslavement of Korean women by the Japanese Imperial Army (although I didn't know it included minors and forced sterilizations) and it's remarkably painful to see Japanese historians and academics and soldiers denying the fact with the ultimately flippant explanation, "We'd never do something like this." When they're pushed as to why these female survivors would make up stories about being raped and drugged, the self-righteous men fall back on the old "blaming the victim" excuse as they label these women — all of them old, unashamed, and refusing to fade into the background — as amoral mercenaries who made good money on the front lines. Someone literally says there was no bigotry by the clientele as if that were a progressive way to spin it. Well, while there's a great pain that comes with admitting a great crime, there's also a great character stain that comes with denying it. One leaves this documentary aware that some of these nay-sayers are leaving a record of their own complicity for future viewers to watch. "Look, there's grandpa defending rapists as soldiers satisfying a biological need!"

And while it is rare for members of a given group — in this case soldiers active in World War II — to bear witness to the atrocities inflicted on innocent civilians (truly prisoners of war) by their fellow soldiers, a few do bravely come forward to speak truth. One is a Japanese translator who witnessed crimes firsthand; another is a Western soldier who admits that while apologies were issued to European women used as sex slaves by soldiers, evidence documenting the crimes inflicted on the Korean women was largely destroyed after the war. What could be the possible motive for these men? Huh? I, for one, admired the tenacity of all these old women who are using their last days on earth to cry out for justice or at least an official apology. I'm only sorry their battle is an uphill one.

I Am Sun Mu: He's Not the Only One

I Am Sun Mu isn't just about Sun Mu, a North Korean artist who defected to the South and now makes Warhol-esque pop art with a sly political bent. Adam Sjoberg's multilayered documentary is also about Liang Kegang, the risk-taking director of the Yuan Art Museum in Beijing who decides to mount a fairly large show devoted to Sun Mu's work. And it's also about Cui Xianji, a Chinese-Korean artist who helps make this exhibit happen. Of course, it's also about Sun Mu's wife and his two kids because you can't be creating work causing such strong sociopolitical reverberations without impacting those nearest and dearest. As such, Sjoberg's doc is a portrait of a time and place as well as it is of a particular person.

The present power of North Korean loyalists in China is felt; the censorship of the Chinese government is seen in action; the courage of a few talented artists taking chances despite the monolithic nature of the institutions set against them is witnessed and then archived and thereby publicly acknowledged. Watching I Am Sun Mu you become aware of how much fascist regimes are intent on restricting their populace's very thoughts by preventing certain countercultural images from ever reaching the masses. It also reminds you that commercial art is really just a form of propaganda serving a less-obvious regime that's backed by the almighty dollar. (I know that it's not Korean but can everyone please check out the mind-expanding PBS doc Trudell?)

I worried about Sun Mu's saftey though. Throughout this doc, he never shows his face. He's seen from behind or blurred out or in silhouette. But his wife and kids are seen clearly. Surely his anonymity has been compromised. You can hardly call this an attention-seeking stunt since he's literally putting his life and livelihood on the line. And you can't say that his art isn't agitating his former homeland, otherwise why would the Chinese government have been so quick to shut the exhibition down?