Editor’s note: This story contains discussion of sexual violence and suicide.
It’s dark in Auditorium 6 of the Regal 16 in Bend. A huge black sphere appears over the audience’s heads. Aliens have come to Earth, and moviegoers have traveled to a new world of possibility.
This was just one of the 110 independent films screened at the 19th Annual BendFilm Festival, which ran in person Oct. 6–9. Here are two films to keep an eye out for.
“Georgia,” directed by Jayil Pak
When “Georgia” screened on Saturday afternoon at Open Space Event Studios, the crowd cried. With its terse script and stellar performances, “Georgia” prods at the failures of our social systems and pulls at the strings of our hearts.
The 30-minute drama follows two parents trying to design a protest banner after the suicide of their daughter who was gang-raped by her classmates. The story took inspiration from a case that occurred in Miryang, South Korea, in 2004.
Despite its subject, “Georgia” is never forced or sentimental. The audience discovers information slowly and in unexpected ways, as grief is often hidden in between breaches to the surface. What the film expresses is undeniable pain — pain which cannot be ignored or forgotten. There is no recourse, as the couple is failed again and again by every institution they turn to. The police close the case; the school refuses to punish the perpetrators; the parents of the rapists offer an apology and nothing more. The wound is left open and irritated.
To rub salt in the wound, the couple is unable to use the typeface they want, Georgia, for their banner. It’s another manifestation of the obstinacy of society, another wall that can’t be broken down. Ultimately, they choose to print and hang the banners anyway, with the characters appearing only as replacement glyphs — the outlines of 21 squares — with the only characters legible being “18.” Their acceptance of the squares parallels their coming to terms with their loss. They can never get the typeface they want, and they can never get their daughter back, but they do their best to live on.
The banners are a powerful visual; we don’t need to be able to read the text they intended to print. We know what it means, as does everyone involved in the crime. A quiet damnation. And that is all the resolution we get.
“Unidentified,” directed by Jude Chun
“Unidentified” is the perfect title for this film. Yes, it has UFOs, but the film itself resists categorization with its hodgepodge of different styles: narrative, documentary, even musical. It begins with a woman’s voice:
“My dad says when he saw my mom singing in the church choir,” she says in Korean, ”it was love at first sight.”
The first image fades in: a huge black sphere sits still above Seoul. Cuts reveal these UFOs are everywhere — looming over the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Dome of the Rock and so on.
By then, two minutes into the 80-minute runtime, Chun has distinguished his UFO film from the rest. These UFOs are not some shiny and swift sci-fi gimmick but static monuments, astonishingly beautiful — so beautiful, in fact, that Bae Jin Baek won best cinematography for “Unidentified” at the awards ceremony on Oct. 9. But in addition to expressing beauty, the opening also tells us something important about the story: the UFOs are not the heart of the film. Sure, they are a constant presence, but this is a film about people and relationships.
The rest of the film takes place in the present day, composed of loosely connected vignettes. The scenes differ greatly in mood. In a humorous scene titled “Good Cop,” a teary restaurant employee recounts to a police officer how a patron hit her for serving her Mountain Dew, and the cop suggests it might be a case of Alien Mind Control Syndrome. In the delightfully strange yet romantic scene “Romeo,” two strangers meet on a bus, and the woman stares and giggles thinking the man is a lover whom she met long before.
In faux documentary interviews, the subjects speak a wide variety of languages: Korean, Turkish, German, Polish, Khmer, Mandarin Chinese, French and Yoruba. Since Chun only knows Korean and English, he had the actors take the script and translate it themselves. In post-production, he had to ask them where the subtitles go.
“I wanted it to feel global,” Chun said during a Q&A session after the screening.
Chun began shooting the film in 2019, having felt the world was increasingly alienated and polarized. Language was a key theme — a feeling that people were speaking different languages even when they were speaking the same one. The pandemic only exacerbated the feeling.
In one ambiguous scene titled “Bad Cop,” two well-dressed men, presumably aliens, stand before a sunset and discuss their story. They came for resources, only to discover upon arrival that Earth was populated. Unwilling to evict humanity, the first man says, the aliens came to a solution: peaceful coexistence. The other man refutes this claim. Their purpose is extermination, he says. The first man lets the second go on for a while about the nature of competition before saying, “I hope … that isn’t the case.”
The film never gives a definitive answer to the meaning of this scene, but it encourages us to question the dominant discourse around aliens.
Chun pays homage to 1996’s “Independence Day” with images of spacecraft hovering over global landmarks, but “Independence Day” and other popular media such as “Alien,” “The X Files” and “Signs” never question the supposedly violent nature of aliens. It’s a trope that reflects and justifies Western society’s violent history of colonization. Colonization is only natural, apparently, for aliens as well as men. Chun’s film is more imaginative in this way. There are no vicious colonists or horrifying monsters. For once, peace is an option. For Chun, “Independence Day” is a simple battle for life or death, while “Unidentified” reflects a generation whose politics feel more complicated. The UFOs transcend their traditional space in science fiction and become a pure vessel for greater meaning.
“For me,” Chun said, “the theme of the whole thing is we make up stories about our lives to make sense.”
“Unidentified” is a story about stories. A viewer need not make sense of every action or every word or every frame. If only the viewer opens their mind and takes in what the film has to offer, they will discover what Chun has given us — a beautiful reflection on love, joy and humanity.
Both “Georgia” and “Unidentified,” though different in mood, manage to address profound themes through intelligent metaphors. They exemplify the power of contemporary Korean cinema to interrogate our world. Even as the film industry continues to change, here is hope that cinema is alive and well, at least for now, in Bend.
You can watch these films and the rest of the lineup as part of BendFilm’s virtual festival Oct. 10–23. Audience award winners will be announced Oct. 24 after streaming and voting have concluded. For more information, visit the festival’s website.
