Director – Lee Dong-ha – 2016 – South Korea – 95m
**1/2
A group of South Korean men are involved in an openly gay, male voice choir – in the documentary season: Korean Film Nights: In Transit presented by the LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival
Seoul. Fast-forward from a theatrical stage. Clubbing. Shopping. A medical check up. Buying medicines from the chemist. Serving drinks at the bar. Getting a cab. Looking at a musical score on the train. Welcome to the lives of a group of gay man, the members of South Korea’s first gay, male voice choir G-voice whose songs articulate issues of gay life and identity. Most of them readily admit to being mediocre singers and one confesses he’s only doing it because his lover is.
College student Sander finds himself thrust into the limelight when he volunteers to take over as the group’s leader. Musical director Jaewoo is a doctor while bass singer Cheolho is a pharmacist. “It’s hard to find songs dealing with gay love affairs”, says Jaewoo. When a friend asked him for some advice, he thought the words would make a great song and turned them in to one. He clearly has a gift for this – this documentary is awash with many such songs he’s written.
The men talk naturally and candidly to camera about their own sexual past. One was outed when his room mate checkout out his computer and discovered gay porn on it, another talks about the internal conflict he felt being both a devout Christian and knowing he was gay, a state his cut and dried, simplistic variant of Christianity told him was wrong because it was sinful and an affront to God.
Sander was working in a bakery and wrote about the problems of stress in the workplace on his blog. Jaewoo read it and turned it into a song. “To have people sing it with me feels really weird,” Sander comments.
Gwangsoo and Seunghwan who are due to get married fail to turn up at their bachelor party the night before. The choir perform some numbers for them at their ceremony the day after until the event is disrupted by a Christian elder turning up to throw faeces at members of the choir as they perform. Jaewoo puts on a brave face, but loses it t understandably get very angry as he goes backstage after the incident.
The choir rehearse with pom-poms as if they were US-style cheerleaders and we watch them performing before a theatre audience visibly comprising members of both sexes. One choir member Norma confesses he’s been unable to invite his parents along. Again, their Christian faith as they understand, live and practice it won’t allow them to countenance gay lifestyle or even identity.
A visit to perform at Paengmok Port Cultural Festival, an event designed to press for justice by recovering the bodies of those lost in the Sewol Ferry disaster, sees a choir performance on the quayside. A slogan on a derrick reads, ‘Make Temporary Jobs Permanent’, hinting at a wider economic landscape from which this film isolates itself. An unexpected, homophobic protest arises as a woman repeatedly shouts the words “die, die, die, die” at them. With characteristic wit, Jaewoo later turns the woman and her bigotry into the subject of another song for the choir.
Because gay people often have a hard time at the hands of widespread social intolerance, there will always be a ready audience for such subject matter. The misguided religious perceptions of LGBTQ people captured on camera here likely reflects what many in at least some of South Korea’s Christian churches think and vocalise – and it makes for depressing viewing. Which is in marked contrast to the generally upbeat spirit of what the men of the G-voice choir are doing in their singing.
Weekends plays in the documentary season: Korean Film Nights: In Transit presented by LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. More info about the season here.
Trailer:
LKFF 2020 TRAILER: