There was no time to actually enjoy festivals. It was almost like a battle, a matter of physical strength. JIN Mo-young and his group departed Incheon airport in the night of July 30, arrived in Sidney, Australia, in the morning and transferred to Melbourne almost right away, to make it to the 1pm screening schedule. Then they headed for Canberra to attend another screening event held at Australia National University. They were then to return to Melbourne after the lecture the next day. JIN just could not turn down the screening and lecture that a Korean professor had kindly arranged.

 

In 2015, My Love, Don’t Cross That River director JIN Mo-young attended film festivals for the first time as a filmmaker, traveling from Melbourne in Australia, LA in the States to Toronto in Canada.

 

 

 

My Love is a documentary film illustrating the love and death of an old couple of 76 years—the 98 year-old man and the 89 year-old woman—in a rural area in Korea where a small river flows. This work was released in late November in 2014, and attracted 4.8 million viewers nationwide in Korea.

 

Now this film has been invited to 16 film festivals in and outside Korea as of August 2015. Except for the DMZ Korean International Documentary Festival and the 16th KOFRA Film Awards, they were all international film festivals or major documentary film festivals. Among these, JIN attended the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, which is the biggest of its kind, the 21st Los Angeles Film Festival and the 64th Melbourne International Film Festival. Later this year, My Love is also scheduled to attend the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film in Germany and Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival in China.

 

The achievement was truly outstanding. My Love was a regular winner of audience’s choice awards and documentary sections at those festivals. JIN received as many as 10 trophies, including the Audience’s Choice Award at the DMZ International Film Festival and the Hot Docs, the Grand Prize and Audience’s Award at the LA Film Festival and the Moscow International Film Festival. What did all these make JIN feel?

 

“The Melbourne Film Festival is known as the biggest film festival in the Southern Hemisphere. They competed with the Sydney Film Festival to screen My Love, and at the end, it ended up being screened at both fests. I was expecting a small theater in Melbourne, but they allocated the biggest screening room with 400 seats, which impressed me. I was very much grateful that the tickets for both screenings were sold out. It was a surprise that the audience was mostly local people rather than Korean immigrants. It is said that Australians drink a lot like us and are quite similar to our nature, and they were watching My Love very seriously and asked a lot of academic and lengthy questions. The programmer was very favorable for the film, too."

 

The Melbourne Film Festival’s competition section is for short films only, but instead, it presents the Audience’s Choice Award—that is not limited to shorts—that is selected based on the direct votes of the viewers. The online vote takes place for 2 weeks upon the closing, and My Love is among the 12 encore screening list as well as a strong candidate for the award. JIN analyzes the response of the local viewers, who have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as follows:

 

“At the LA Film Festival, the audience laughed and cried with the film as if they were watching a sitcom while the Australian audience was somewhat shy. But at both festivals, I felt a certain universal feeling. Especially in LA, it was not much different from what I felt when I watched it with local elderly people at a screening event in the country in Korea, conversing and sympathizing together. When the couple were playing with fallen leaves, I myself thought, "Isn’t it a little too much?" But I felt as if the audience was watching the film in the position of the director, loosening up themselves and enjoying every bit of it.

 

In addition, they did not take it as a documentary per se. For us, a documentary seen is more as a cultural vanity or a kind of activism. However, in the west, there seems to be no such distinction. What counts more is whether it is a good film, a fun film. To them, a documentary is also just a film that you watch laughing and crying. Documentary filmmaker Michael MOORE once said: “Don’t call it a documentary, it's just a film.” He means that as soon as you say documentary, you do weird stuff and depict ideology. However, the western audience seems to enjoy the film as it is, without drawing such lines."

 

 

 

The festival that impressed JIN, a documentarian full of self-identity, the most was clearly the Hot Docs. The Hot Docs is known to be one of the two major documentary festivals along with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in Europe, and within the industry, is often referred as the “Cannes Film Festival for documentaries”. The Amsterdam Festival to Europe is what the Hot Docs is to Northern America. Here, My Love was one of the top 5 films, voted by the audience. The official selection for My Love is all the more special because Korean documentaries have only been invited for retrospectives or special screenings.

 

“What was impressive in the Hot Docs was that it has a big budget and huge audience base, despite it being a documentary film festival. Whether young or old, men or women, people lined up for a whole hour to see a documentary. I also saw many senior citizens volunteer for the festival. Most of all, the viewers at the Hot Docs did not draw lines between feature films and documentaries. After the screening, they would feel a lot of identification with what was in the film. What was a little embarrassing and yet interesting was that people lined up to take a picture with the director, saying that they wanted to record a memorable and impressive moment of their life. To be sure, it was the first time I ever got an award in a ceremony, but what was even more impressive than getting an award was to meet such great audience.”

 

Year 2015 was busier for JIN than for anyone else. He worked day and night shooting his next film Strangers, dealing with the already busy schedule of lectures and film festivals for My Love, though it is not showing in cinema any more. Strangers features a North Korean refugee diver, and was shot for 2 years and only a follow-up shooting is left before completion next spring.

 

For JIN, who is planning to bring My Love to the more international audience and sound out a potential international co-production, international film festivals were great opportunities to make a global network and make sure of global audience’s eye level. At the Guangzhou Film Festival this fall, he is also planning meetings with Chinese investors. Through the visits to the international film festivals this year, JIN developed his thoughts and broadened the scope. It was a gift from My Love for JIN, who never had any experience in attending film festivals or winning awards.

 

“I always thought shooting was of the foremost importance, but now I know it is not. I didn't like the idea of fitting the shooting timeline to film festivals' submission schedules but now that I think about it. It was a good opportunity to think over again the very motivation of My Love and be consistent with it: to make a film with a universal and global perspective. I gained practical confidence in investment and distribution too. Further, I learned for sure that Korean documentaries are warmly received in the international film milieu and film festivals."