Director – Kim Si-jin – 2012 – South Korea – 11m
***1/2
A man enters a mysterious room and eats a cooked chicken… – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th
A man enters a room he should probably not have entered. Inside, on a table, is a cooked chicken under a protective metal lattice net. Periodically, the net rises and he eats some of the tasty chicken. He’s devoured maybe 80% of it in several binges of consumption when it starts moving of its own volition, recalling the moving chicken dinner in Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977).
Then the situation changes as a giant arrives and sits at the table, and our protagonist finds himself under the protective metal lattice net.
All this gains a strange, otherworldly, surreal quality through being wrought in stop-frame animation with striking puppets.
Giant’ Room plays in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th.