Download Asia is booming and rapid economic and social changes are taking place across the region particularly in countries like China and South Korea.
Three new Asian films deal with the sense of loss many people are feeling as a new and often dehumanised civilization is built changing old ways of living.
Ric Wasserman went to see the films and met with the directors at the Stockholm International Film Festival.
Bloody Fight in Iron Rock Valley is a western, but set in the South Korean countryside.
The anti-hero played by Lee Moo Saeng, out to fight an organised crime syndicate, rides a motorcyle instead of a horse.
First-time director Hajean Ji and his film won best Korean Independent film this year at the Punchon International Film Festival.
”When I was growing up I loved to see Sergio Leone’s western films, and I especially enjoyed Enrico Morricone’s music. The atmosphere was something I wanted to recreate in my own film.”
There are still plenty of shootouts and gruesome torture scenes, but the story hinges around a quest to stop a mining project which has polluted the local drinking water.
Hajean says the film is a metafor for the rape of Korea’s natural beauty in the name of progress and unbridled greed:
”The country developed so fast during the last 50 years, much faster than in the other countries in the region. They sacrificed people for development. The avenger in my film is the tool for justice, something we can’t get ouselves, but we get it through him. He speaks for our collective need when he says that’s enough, and takes action.”
In South Korean Jeon Kyu-Hwans film Dance Town, there’s little dancing.
Instead, it’s a bleak story of a middle-aged North Korean woman, Rhee, who defects to Seoul, when her husband is arrested.
She’s given a South Korean passport and an apartment which is secretly TV monitored by her state minder.
It’s a grey, cold, and haunting existence as Rhee, longing for human contact, is preyed upon by misfits, an amorous policeman, a cripple and feel-good Christians.
There are certainly two very different Koreas, but Rhee, adrift in a new and frightening world finds that freedom in South Korea, like most things, is not always easy.
In Big Blue Lake, directed by Jessie Tsang, the sense of loss is again apparent, though this time it’s felt when Lai Lee, an actress, returns from the city to her village to visit her Alzheimer stricken mother whose memory is fading fast.
She also wanders off, getting lost.
In the search to find her, Lai Lee connects with an old classmate, who helps in the rescue.
They go off in search of the Big Blue Lake, never finding it, because it doesn’t exist.
It’s a metafor for happiness, and of memories, real and imaginary.
Director Jessie Tsang.
”Memory is not reliable, it doesn’t, (isn’t) so we put that element in our film.”
Big Blue Lake is set in Jessie’s home village of Ho Chung, in the Hong Kong rural “new territories area”.
A place that is that risks being lost to rampant industrialisation.
”It just makes me upset. There’s lots of landfills, there’s getting less and less space in my village.”
It’s not only the landscape that’s disappearing; it’s the culture as well. The film Big Blue Lake forces us to consider who we are, and where we’re going.
The film includes documentary style interviews with villagers recalling their past lives as fishermen and farmers.
They’ll be gone soon, says Jesse Tsang...their stories, and songs, with them.
”If we don’t record it actually will be gone. No more farming. Nobody knows how to sing a song.”
