The personal and political overlap in Park Chan-Ok's haunting drama Paju, which opens the festival this year. The director talks to Edward Lawrenson
Park Chan-Ok's most vivid memory of shooting Paju, the haunting drama that opens this year's IFFR, is of getting lost on the way to the set. Filming in the South Korean city from which her second feature takes its name, she was en route to her location when a thick fog descended: “The navigation system kept saying the set was nearby, but I couldn't see anything outside to tell which street was which. The director of photography was with me at the time, and he even suggested that we just leave the car and walk.”
The incident was telling, Park continues, “not because were were anxious about being late, but because it felt mysterious and a bit out of touch with reality.” This sense of strangeness and disorientation enriches the atmosphere of Park's film. Revolving around the relationship between political activist Joong-Shik (Lee Sun Kyun) and his younger sister-in-law Eunmo (Seo Woo), the movie is a subtly textured character study. Using flashbacks to follow her lead couple over a seven-year time span, Park's style is intricate and elliptic, an approach – she suggests – that stimulates her audience's curiosity.
At the heart of this is the growing tension between Joong-Shik and Eunmo, and the young woman's suspicion that Joong-Shik was responsible for the death of her sister in a gas explosion. The couple are stalked by events from their past in other ways too: Joong-Shik is on the run from police after the young son of a former lover was injured while in his care, and Eunmo is still struggling to come to terms with her sister's death.
Talking about the couple at the centre of her film, Park comments: “I think people in general are rather mysterious. There’s always something about them that you can’t quite grasp. Paju weaves in the death of Eunmo’s sister, which basically creates something to chase after, something that’s palpable. When I look back on it, I think I was inspired by some of the novels I had read by Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami or Karel Capek. Their characters chase after a particular question, but somehow, the results become distorted, and the whole chase becomes meaningless.”
As well as being an evocative portrait of these two troubled individuals (beautifully played by Lee and Seo), the film also provides a lively and atmospheric picture of its eponymous setting. Fleeing from Seoul, Joong-Shik ends up in Paju, a city near the border with North Korea, and becomes involved in the attempts by a group of squatters to resist the commercial development of a downtown neighbourhood. Depicting the violent struggle between Joong-Shik's band of activists and construction workers, the film reflects some of the political tensions to have erupted recently around the pace and scale of property development in Park's homeland.
“Korean society is quite dynamic”, she explains. “There’s always construction going on, things being built, torn down, built again. In the past, development in Paju was postponed due to the possibility of war, but ever since relations between North and South have become quite amiable, development is in progress throughout the city. Recently, there’s been a lot of press about the serious conflict over the demolition in Yongsan, a particular district in Seoul. It was a serious incident that ultimately led to the deaths of six people. These kinds of tragedies should hopefully stop occurring, but it doesn’t seem like there will be a solution to the cycle any time soon.”
Honoured to be opening the IFFR – “It's amazing” she tells the Tiger – Park is in fact a Rotterdam regular. Paju is a former CineMart project: “We were able to confirm the international potential of the film,” she recalls. And in 2003, Park won a Tiger for her debut Jealousy is My Middle Name. “Despite receiving the award, it still took a while for me to get funding for my second film,” she says. “Who knows? Maybe it might not have even worked out if I hadn’t received the Tiger Award.”
Above all the Tiger Award is welcomed by Park as “a sort of reassurance for me not to give up my own ideology or philosophy, if you will, when it comes to film-making. It gave me the courage that I needed to continue making movies. To have your film be appreciated by audiences in your own country feels different from having foreign audiences appreciating your film. It’s sort of like having your parents tell you you’re pretty and then hearing the same compliment from others. That’s what it felt like for me when I received the Tiger Award.”
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