Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 6, 2007|Volume 35, Number 24

Symposium, workshop look
at Korean film, refugee crisis

The Council on East Asian Studies, part of the MacMillan Center at Yale, will hold two special events this week: a symposium on contemporary Korean film and a workshop on North Korean refugees.

Film conference

The conference, "A Cinema of Affect: Contemporary Korean Cinema," will take place Thursday-Friday, April 12-13, in the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. The event is co-sponsored by Yale's Film Studies Program.

The organizers write: "According to some scholars, the emotional payoffs in classical Hollywood cinema are the by-products of compelling, causally-tight storytelling. Contemporary Korean cinema seems to offer a counter example. From the so-called 'Asian Extreme' cinema of Kim Ki-duk's sensationalist films to Park Chan-wook's 'Vengeance' trilogy, from popular genre films to Korean TV mini-series dramas such as 'Winter Sonata,' priority seems to be given to the maximizing of affective responses and the evoking of excessive emotions rather than to the telling of a coherent story."

Participants will explore the aesthetic significance of this trend and examine some of the ways in which visceral emotions are produced in contemporary Korean cinema.

On Thursday, seven short films will be screened 7-9:30 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium. They are: "From Morning to Evening" (directed by Ik-tae Lee, 1970), "Color of Korea" (Ok-hee Han, 1976), "Another Room" (Kong-hee Ree, 1979), "Daydream" (Jeong-gook Lee, 1984), "The Exhibition of Mr. Kant" (Kim Tae-Yeong, 1987), "A Black Christmas Eve" (Dae-hyun Kim, 1993) and "Promenade in the Rain" (Soo-rye Lim, 1994).

On Friday, there will be a keynote address titled "A Brief Look at Short Korean Film" by Julian Stringer of the University of Nottingham (12:30 p.m.) and two panel discussions: "Sympathy for Whom? Moral Modulations in Contemporary Korean Cinema and Drama" (1:40 p.m.) and "Cruelty -- Yes, Cruelty: The Korean Extreme" (4 p.m.). All these events will take place in Rm. 208 of the center.

For information on registration, send e-mail to anne.letterman@yale.edu before April 10. For more information on the conference, visit http://research.yale.edu/eastasianstudies/events.php.

Workshop on refugees

A special workshop titled "North Korean Refugees: A Complex Humanitarian Crisis" will take place on Saturday, April 14, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. in the third-floor auditorium of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Ave.

Over the past decade, nearly 100,000 North Koreans have fled economic deprivation and political repression in their home country. The vast majority transit through China during their journey toward permanent resettlement, with many relocating in South Korea.

This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together specialists in history, economics, political science, public health and psychiatry to examine the political and economic developments driving migration; the patterns and magnitudes of the refugee flows; the challenges of resettling a traumatized population, and ways that the U.S. government can alleviate the suffering of this population. The workshop will also include a special screening and discussion session on the 2004 documentary film by Pieter Fleury "North Korea: A Day in the Life."

This workshop is made possible by support from the United States Department of Education.

The registration deadline for the workshop is Wednesday, April 11. Those interested in attending should send an e-mail to eastasian.studies@yale.edu, and include their name, institutional affiliation, mailing address and telephone number. For more information, visit http://research.yale.edu/eastasianstudies/nkrefugeeposter.pdf.

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