In the last years, it became almost a tradition to watch a Korean film from the Generation-section and I was never disappointed. Films like Fighter by Jéro Yun or Kim Boras breathtaking debut Beol-sae (House of Hummingbird) are still in my memory. This time another impressing children film, Bimileui Eondeok (The Hill of Secrets) by Lee Ji-eun came to my attention. It is about the 12-years old girl Myung-eun and about her proletarian origin. She denies her family and dreams of more elegant and wealthy parents. In the last 30 years, Korea became one of the most interesting and in its diversity richest Asian film countries and last but not least because of the fact that even its film history is more discovered outside of Korea.
Bimileui Eondeok is one of these films I saw recently which brought me to the idea, that Korean cinema created something like their own shomingeki-films, means films on ordinary life and about ordinary people with a special view on every day life, a cinematic movement once cultivated in the two great eras of Japanese cinema but mostly abandoned by the Japanese like the Italian abandoned finally their Neo-Realism.
Like following a certain tradition in contemporary Korean Cinema, Lee Ji-euns film is earnest (though not completely free of humour) in revealing longings and problems of children or adolescents. She offers a seismographic sensitive look into the world of children including often the dark idea what a problematic, unjust and hierarchic world is waiting for them. The anyway spare use of children cuteness can disappear from one moment to the next completely. Bimileui Eondeok has very few narrative twists. That what we call a story seems naturally originated from the surface of the world revealed in this film.
The aspect which distinguishes this Korean view on everyday life from the Japanese every day dramas films from the 1930s and 1950s, is often a personal if not autobiographical point of view. Like in Woorideul (The World of Us) by Yoon Ga-eun (Berlinale-Generation 2016), Nammaeui Yeoreumbam (Moving On) by Yoon Dan-bi or Kim Boras film, I mentioned above are inspired by childhood memories and I presume that it goes as well for Lee Ji-euns film, which – by the way takes place in 1996.
The seeming lightness of Bimileui Eondeok, its almost non-event- narration has this special side effect to sharpen the spectator´s attention. There are sometimes invasions of the more brutal and reckless world of the adult life like a school director who is more interested in the reputation of his school than in the children. The world of class differences is already mirrored in the school class.
It is also a film about inferiority feelings, originated from a certain place in society. And to reveal this feelings, the film does not need much more than some exchanges of glances. This seeming attention for the surface of the world manifests the hidden depth of this film- When Myung-eun feels ashamed about the low social and educational status of her parents, her school class gets two new girls who pretend to be twin sisters but in reality they are different daughters of prostitutes. When these two girls are mobbed by their classmates, Myung-eun participates at the beginning. It is one of the darkest but also sharpest moment in this film and for a moment our heroine is already poisoned by this unjust and cruel world which is waiting for her. But the phenomenon is that Lee Ji-eon approaches these insight almost only by patient observation without the least trace of any ideological predetermination.
Like all great films about children and like in this historic prototypes of children films, Umarate wamita keredo (I was born, but..., Yasujiro Ozu) or Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica) Bimileul Eondeok ends with a painful perception of a child about the world which is waiting for her. Bimileui Eondeok, this beautiful and unpretentious film by Lee Ji-eun belongs to a certain kind of new Korean films which also make me think about the greatest European film theorist of a cinematic realism, André Bazin (1918-1958).
Rüdiger Tomczak
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