Why I traveled 200 miles to watch a movie
The obsession began three years ago, when that summer, I watched 30 movies in the span of two weeks. I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, for a study abroad program, and the school had secured passes for us to the city’s famed film festival. Our assignment was to watch as many movies and attend as many events as we could.
In the whirlwind of movie screenings, director talkbacks and happy hours, I discovered the pulsing energy of film festivals, and ever since, I jumped on any opportunity to attend a film festival in whatever city, in whatever country I happened to find myself. So when I started working for a newspaper in South Korea through a Princeton in Asia fellowship, Busan was in my sights.
By chance, as I was closing the day’s paper one Friday night, I saw a listing for a film by one of my favorite cinematographers. The screening was that Sunday, and there was one ticket left. I impulsively bought the last ticket and quickly booked a seat on a train to leave early Sunday morning. I would return on an overnight train the same day to get back in time for work the next morning.
From my home base in Seoul, the port city of Busan is about 200 miles south. At five hours, it is one of the longest train journeys in South Korea. With its strategic location on the country’s coast, Busan played an outsize role in the nation’s postwar industrialization, and this history is still visible today. From atop the city’s Yongdusan Park, you can spot freight ships traveling in and out of the port. Down below in the narrow alleys, you can rub shoulders with Russian sailors on break and eat a fish cooked straight from the marketplace as ajumma roll kimbap in the middle of the street.
This industrial element of the city, rough around the edges and a bit standoffish, contrasts the glamour of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF). BIFF’s red carpet events take place near the picaresque Haeundae Beach, billed as Asia’s answer to the French Riviera. The main venue is a colossal postmodern glass-plated convention center. Another venue just across the street is a massive 10-auditorium movie theater inside the Shinsegae Department Store, which holds the title of largest shopping mall in the world. During the two-week festival in October, one might find renowned directors casually strolling on the beachfront boardwalk in Busan or scarfing down a bowl of gukbap at a nearby hole in the wall.
That Sunday, I had traveled five hours to see one movie, and one movie only — an arthouse genre bender by the eccentric cinematographer Christopher Doyle. The three-part film titled “Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled, Preoccupied, Preposterous” appeared in the festival’s documentary strand, but it is better described as a prose poem than a journalistic piece. It has gained notoriety for being one of the first films to contain actual footage from the democracy protests that gripped the city one year ago.
The three parts of the film are so named for their subject matter: “Preschooled” follows the travails of young children, “Preoccupied” throws the viewer in the middle of the Umbrella Movement and “Preposterous” follows an eponymous speed dating group for the elderly.
The film caught my eye because its subject holds particularly special personal meaning: Hong Kong was the city that gave my family its freedom.
Some 50 years ago, my uncle fled Communist China to the then-British colony via a common route taken by millions of refugees: swimming for seven hours across the Mirs Bay. His migration story became the subject of my undergraduate thesis. Doyle’s “Hong Kong Trilogy” includes an interview with one such refugee.
Doyle’s piece is an ode to his adopted home. The Australian auteur moved to the city 40 years ago and has never left since, an expat-turned immigrant. He is fluent in Cantonese, so much so that his English, though noticeably Australian, has a Cantonese twinge. Doyle, along with the film’s producer, Jennifer Shyn, were present at BIFF for a post-screening Q&A, during which Doyle, slightly unhinged and maybe a little intoxicated, waxed nostalgic about a Hong Kong slowly fading as the Chinese government tightens its grip on the city.
“This was not a movie,” he exclaimed while sauntering around the stage. “This was a celebration — a jam, energy.”
“They [the protesters] made noise — we made a movie,” he said. “So if you want to make movies, make noise.”
The film is choreographed imagery layered on top of interview fragments with real-life Hong Kong denizens. The shots are lively, colorful, beautiful and depict the quotidian minutiae of people’s lives as they go to school, scurry to work, attend protests and play music on the streets of Kowloon, Central and the New Territories.
Doyle contributed the mise-en-scene while Shyn conducted the interviews. The director emphasized that the piece was not a work of cinema, but “moving picture.” Rather than call the trilogy “Preschooled, Preoccupied, Preposterous,” Doyle joked that the piece should really be described as “personal, political, poetic.”
“Somewhere between [Hollywood blockbuster] ‘Fast and Furious 75’ and a dog jumping out off a building on fucking YouTube, there is this,” he said, pointing at the screen behind him where the film was just shown. “And we need more of this.”
One of my favorite things about film festivals is that even with the picaresque locales and celebrity sightings, in the end, it is the films themselves that are the stars. And often, the films are works of art that cannot be seen anywhere else, whether it’s because they were made for festivals or unmarketable elsewhere. It didn’t matter that I only spent three hours actually touring Busan — I was content to have spent half my day in a movie theater, watching a piece that so delicately weaved together images of the city my family called home for so many years.
I thought I was there to attend a film festival. But really, I had traveled all the way to Busan to be taken away to Hong Kong.
