Korean-American Film Festival director Dai Sil Kim presents 'Silence… (Lombard for News, Mariela )
BY JI HYUN PARK
DAILY NEWS WRITER
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Korean American Film Festival New York brings moviemakers from different ends of the world, but when the fifth edition opens Thursday in Manhattan, three local directors will take their turn in the spotlight.
Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is featured in the festival's first retrospective with six compelling documentaries about the Korean and Korean-American community.
A decade-long New Yorker, Kim-Gibson says she turns to Fort Tryon Park, her "backyard," for quiet moments of recollection. It's a break from what she calls the electric pulse of creativity and diversity necessary to survive in the city.
"More than any other time, the forgotten issues in my films must be revisited," she says.
In "Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women," she presents Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese in WWII. In "Motherland," she introduces Koreans who live in Cuba and asks questions about the meaning of home.
Following screenings Saturday of "Sa-I-Gu" and "Wet Sand: Voices From L.A. 10 Years Later," Kim-Gibson will lead a discussion with Jung Hui Lee, who lost her son during the Los Angeles riots.
On a Las Vegas trip with a friend in 2002, Maria Yoon got married twice - to a showgirl dressed as Diana Ross and to a waiter at a five-star restaurant - "just go through the motions and see what happens," she says.
"That was the beginning of it," Yoon, 39, says. Filled with questions about what that perfect wedding means, she set out for answers in all 50 states, marrying "brides and grooms and even things" while wearing a hanbok, the traditional Korean dress.
"Maria the Korean Bride" is a 15-minute look at her weddings. She proposes to random strangers and gets married on a horse in Wyoming and to a 700-pound Black Angus bull in Nebraska. "At the end of the day," Yoon says. "It's me collecting stories in every state and what people had to say about love and marriage."
The Cooper Union alum has worked for 15 years as a private tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"As an artist, I think you have to live here," she says. "New York City is its own utopia."
Iris Shim met Andrew Suh in 2001 when she was a freshman at the University of Chicago. Her good friend was his pen pal and she wanted Shim at their first meeting - at the Pontiac Correctional Facility, where he was serving an 80-year sentence for killing his sister's fiance.
