South Korean documentary filmmaker Seungjun Yi won the award for Best Feature Length Documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2011. He spoke to Screen Africa at the recent Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) about making the award winning Planet of Snail.
Director Seungjun Yi initially met the subjects of his documentary, deaf blind Young-Chan and his wife Soon-Ho while making a factual TV programme in 2008. When he started to plan his second feature documentary, he remembered this remarkable man.
“I wasn’t sure if it would make a good documentary though, because Young-Chan’s life is so simple. Without his wife he can’t even go out of the house, it’s just too dangerous. However, I believe that everyday life is not simple when you observe it in detail,’ explained Yi.
He realised that Young-Chan has very unique senses and experiences the world differently, and is also a talented writer. “When he was young, he was very desperate – he couldn’t communicate and therefore he couldn’t know the world around him, but he realised that he could write.’
During filming and editing, Yi focused on capturing the tempo of Young-Chan’s life. “I didn’t hurry him. When he was in a bad mood and didn’t want to be filmed, I respected that. I filmed for two years at intervals, sometimes staying with them for two or three days, sometimes shorter. I captured about 120 hours of footage.’
Alternative structure
He stresses that the documentary doesn’t follow the Hollywood structure. “There are lots of TV programmes dealing with disabled people. I didn’t like the way they tell the story of “disabled person overcoming obstacles’. I wanted Planet of Snail to be different,’ notes Yi.
The film is a South Korea, Japan and Finland co-production. Yi explained that he attended pitches in Korea and abroad and received financing from the Sundance Documentary Fund, a US grant, NHK in Japan, the Finnish Film Foundation, YLE in Finland and NRK in Norway.
The documentary was shot in HD on a Canon A1. “People say the cinematography is very poetic. It’s not easy to recreate the world of the protagonists, so I tried to show it through a surreal look. The sound design – done by a Finnish team – was also very important.’
Yi says he received amazing responses from audiences at IDFA. “They liked the characters very much, and said that they’re very different to disabled people they’ve seen depicted before. It’s also a love story, and the audiences were very moved by Young-Chan’s life. They also liked the excerpts from his essays and poems.’
The film is due for theatrical release in Japan and Korea in spring 2012. Negotiations are ongoing with other distributors and festivals to allow the film to travel further.
By Linda Loubser
Screen Africa Magazine – March 2012
