HOW TO MAKE KIMCHI (OR HOW TO BE KOREAN)
A film by Jonathan Lee
2021 | Digital Video | Color | 25fps
How To Make Kimchi (or How To Be Korean) is incidentally not a film about how to make kimchi. Weaving together archives and intimate homemade footage the piece rests itself on the anchor of family. Through this anchor point the past is explored and reconciled with imagery from the Korean War and ideas of nationality questioned and probed. What does it mean to be Korean? What does it mean to be American? Will I lose all my connection to my Koreanness when my parents pass?
Wrestling with these questions, the piece acts as a patchwork, picking up and stitching together folk tales, family dialogue, and the past hoping with an open honesty and love to find answers to the question of belonging.
Director’s statement: In How To Make Kimchi (or How To Be Korean) I document my family through found and created material tracking the course of what it means to be in the crux of Koreaness and Americanness. I hope to explore the boundaries defined by history and trauma while also telling a story that is intimately personal and one in which we make our home in. I also incorporate Korean folk tales that I remember fondly while growing up, as well as a blending of my own made up tales, to create this patchwork of memory in family and culture.
I hope that somehow, through creating these small interconnected and faulty memories, I can begin to solidify the often confusing reality of people in flux hoping to find an anchor point.
Selections:
2021 Characters - Antimatter Media Art Festival, Victoria (CA)
2021 Expanded Short Competition - International Human Rights Film Festival, Vienna (AT)
2021 International Competition - Beijing International Short Film Festival, Beijing (CN)
2022 Exhibition: One song is very much like another and the boat is always from afar - Times Museum, Guangzhou (CN)
2022 Short Film Market Picks - Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival, Clermont Ferrand (FR)
2022 Limburg Film Festival, Venlo (NL)
2022 Project A World: Experimental - Chicago Youth Film Festival, Chicago (US)
2023 Video Power Program - Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Hamburg (DE)