Category: Documentary

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Remnants
(Gong-Dong-
Jeong-Beom,
공동정범)

Director – Kim Il-rhan, Lee Hyuk-sang – 2016 – South Korea – 116m

****

Revisiting the Korean towering inferno: follow-up doc to Two Doors, has survivors of the Yongsan tragedy released from prison to tell their side of the story and grapple with the resulting emotional and psychological problems – from the London Korean Film Festival 2017

Set to open in Korea in 2018, this is the follow-up documentary to Two Doors (Kim il-rhan/ Hong Ji-you, 2012) about the Yongsan tragedy in which a policeman and five protesters were killed in a fire atop a housing block during a protest. One of the limitations imposed on that film was the incarceration of those protesters that escaped the burning rooftop lookout atop the Yongsan building. Viewers of the first film kept asking what had happened to these people.

The short answer is: four years after originally being sentenced, they were pardoned and released. This meant that they were now available to tell their own stories, so Kim and Lee from the Pinks film making collective and their crew started talking to them on camera. Slowly, a second film started to emerge. It’s not exactly a sequel, more a follow up.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Two Doors
(Doo Gae-eui
Moon,
두개의 문)

Director – Kim Il-rhan, Hong Ji-you – 2011 – South Korea – 101m

*****

Is this the Korean Grenfell Tower? Threatened eviction, SWAT, lethal building fire: compelling documentary about the Yongsan tragedy in which a police raid on a group of housing protesters went horribly wrong – from the London Korean Film Festival 2017

The story of the Yongsan tragedy. Yongsan is an area of Central Seoul which had been the site of a US military base and the infrastructure such as bars and prostitution which had grown up around it. Once the US military decamped to another area, the developers hoped to move in and regenerate the area. For ‘regenerate’ read ‘gentrify’, a situation not entirely unfamiliar in parts of the UK at present. In Yongsan, when some tenants in one particular housing block refused to move out, activists seized on this and helped stage a protest.

Instead of listening to their grievances as the protesters would have hoped, the authorities surrounded the block with police whose presence only served to aggravate the protesters into throwing firebombs. The police subsequently stormed the building with intent to remove the protesters who barricaded themselves inside and whose last stand would take place in a lookout structure on the roof of the building.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

78/52

Director – Alexandre O. Philippe – 2017 – US – Cert. 15 – 91m

*****

Oh, mother, mother, what have you done??? Find out everything you ever wanted to know about the infamous shower scene, in this doc about Psycho – in the London Film Festival on October 13th and 15th 2017, cinemas on Friday, November 3rd 2017, and then on DVD and BFI Player Rental in 2018

When Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock) first came out in 1960, no one knew about the shower scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so.

This documentary is called 78/52 after the shower scene’s number of set-ups (78) and cuts (52). Psycho was shot in four weeks; one of the four was dedicated to shooting that one scene.

In some ways, 78/52 doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It talks a lot about Psycho the cultural phenomenon before it eventually gets round to the shower scene… [Read the rest]

78/52 is on BFI Player. It played BFI London Film Festival 2017 prior to cinema and DVD release.

Full review: DMovies.org.

Trailer:

Psycho trailer:

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Camp 14:
Total Control Zone

Director – Marc Weise – Cert. 12 – 2012 – Germany, South Korea – 106m

*****

Utterly devastating documentary built around interviews with (mainly) a man who was born into and as an adult escaped from a North Korean Death Camp and (with less material) a former guard at one such camp. It being impossible to film inside such camps, the film makers brilliantly deploy bleak, grey toned animation to put images of camp life (classrooms, public executions) on the screen. Be horrified as humans grow and develop in an environment devoid of moral goodness. One of the most unsettling films you’ll ever see.

Here’s the trailer:

This review originally appeared in Film Review Annual.