Trailer
/Hello, my name is Yu Young Lee. I am currently a sophomore attending Georgetown University in Washington DC, and I’m majoring in English.
Hearing David Rubin talk about the casting process as an unapologetically creative one has made me appreciate just how experimental and unbound the whole filmmaking process is. And how in this freedom that is so intrinsic to this artistic endeavor, there is just so much possibility. Now more than ever, we are going beyond these questions about who best fits a mold, and we’re starting to think about the mold itself. What kinds of stories are we telling? What kinds of stories are we listening to? Whose voices have the mic? And whose voices deserve to have their turn?
Rubin’s experiences with an array of genres, actors and stories, his advocacy for all sorts of films, especially those outside the quote unquote “mainstream”, resonates deeply with me. I was born in Korea, and I have spent most of my life outside of it, growing up in Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and now, the United States. I can’t really say that I have a home in the most conventional terms, but I find one on the bridges intersecting all these facets of myself and the art I immerse myself in.
Rubin mentions how he takes pride in the changing of the name of the “Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film” to “Best International Feature Film.” and I too believe it’s an important change, a critical one even.
To some, one word is a subtlety that hardly makes a difference but the bridge of “inter” in internationalism is not lost on me. The abrasiveness of such a word like “foreign” isn’t lost on me either. “Foreign” is akin to “alien.” and to have a concept like “foreign” in such an innately diverse world of film is to demarcate the scopes of the human experience.
When Parasite won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay this year, a lot of people asked me what I thought. How did I feel, as a Korean to see a Korean film have such a victory? Was I proud? Well, yes, of course I was. But I was more hopeful of what it represented. Later on in this interview, David Rubin says, “people fundamentally want to be heard and want to be seen,” and in that global moment of Parasite’s recognition, it felt like I was seeing into a peephole of the future where Rubin’s words ring truer than ever.
It was a victory of art, for art. Because the real success of Parasite is not a translation of the Korean language, although this in itself is not to be dismissed, but rather a transcendence of film as an shared experience.
When you see a good film, you know. It’s hard to put this universality and power into words, but I’d like to share a short prose poem that I wrote in my attempts to describe it.
<Trailer or trying to describe what good film is in the span of a shortening minute>
Only in this instance is time measured by your inability to grasp it. The slippage, like porridge through your fingers, only it tastes better. When in the 5th grade, they talked about synesthesia, you didn’t really understand how the senses eloped together and transcended one another, how it could all muddle up so decidedly in your brain. Like you could have taste buds on the soles of your feet, the ground you tread made a palatable palette.
But here, your eyes are eating the moving pictures up like breakfast. Each frame and frequency add up to instances, one heralding the next, and the next thing you know, you are watching many instances; you have forgotten what an instance is.
They all disappear into one phantasmic feeling that leaves your gut shivering and your heart quaking.
Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash
