The Bird Who Stops in the Air

VANCOUVER PREMIERE ► Jeon Soo-Il calls The Bird Who Stops in the Air “my first real feature”; Wind Echoing in My Being, his debut feature, was actually a compendium of three separate short stories. A beautifully filmed, deliberately paced, and semi-autobiographical drama structured around an uncertain journey, Bird showcases many of the director’s chief themes, motifs and aesthetic methods. Kim (Sol Kyung-Gu) is a filmmaker and film professor at a regional university (Jeon is himself a film professor at Kyungsung University). He is not liked by his bored students, who are less interested in art and theory than in pursuing careers in the commercial film industry, and his relationship with his girlfriend, Young-Hie (Kim So-Hee), also an academic, is similarly less than satisfactory; her efforts to spark his interest in their future together prove futile. Preoccupied by his current filmmaking project — a documentary about birds, inspired by this memories and dreams, and by his yearning to fly — Kim doesn’t notice that his professional and personal lives are falling apart. Despite his increasing estrangement from everyone, he agrees to accompany Young-Hie on a trip to her home village… Colour, 35mm, in Korean with English subtitles. 106 mins.