Korean filmmaker Park Kiyong interviews a Christchurch Korean couple about their decade-long struggle to establish a successful CBD restaurant business – and the impact of the February 22 earthquake.
If I try to avoid an earthquake, something else will happen because I am running away.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2011
Moving 2011
Korean couple Jung Jin-suk and Lee Kyung-mi and their two sons immigrated to Christchurch in 2002 after Jung had formed a favourable impression of the city while working there for a Korean company. In this extremely simple and affecting film, they talk frankly of their long struggle to establish themselves, and their success, after many hard times and much hard work, with two busy restaurants in the CBD. When the calamity of February 22 struck they had a lot to lose. Shot in April, the film catches them in the process of measuring the spiritual and psychological dimensions of their material loss. They are both engrossing storytellers and adept at addressing ill fortune without rancour. Korean filmmaker ParkKiyong (Camel(s), NZIFF01), currently in Auckland on an Auckland University research fellowship, interrupts the interview with plain, lingering images of the devastated CBD. Staring into the red zone from the periphery, he asks Korea and the rest of the world to spend a moment contemplating what Christchurch wakes up to every day. — BG