Tropical Manila

(South Korea, 2008, 84 mins)

HDCam

North American Premiere

PRODS: Ana Agabin, Lim Ji-A
SCR: Lee Sang-Woo
CAM: Poppet Celdran
ED: Jung Eun-Young
MUS: Cho Sung-Hyun
Cast: Kim Su-Nam, Jerald de Vera, Maries Chanel Rebucas, Ri-Na Woo

Lee Sang-Woo’s scandalously lurid debut feature could only have come from the wilder shores of indie filmmaking. While studying at UC Berkeley, Lee was injured by a bomb-blast as he called his mother from a public pay-phone (someone had been trying to blow open the coinbox to rob it); he was hospitalized for months and found himself thinking often about his mother. Some time later, after working as assistant to the notorious Kim Ki-Duk in Korea, he went to Manila with three million won in his pocket, determined to make a film. During extensive researches in the city’s lower depths, he met the man who inspired Tropical Manila: a Korean conman with a Filipina wife and a powerful longing for his mother in Korea.

The film imagines a man wanted for murder in Korea, Kim Dusik, who is hiding in the Philippines, selling fish in a street-market. He regularly beats his Filipina wife Medusa, earning the undying hatred of their Oedipal son Philip, who rejects any idea that he is part-Korean. Kim looks forward to an imminent reunion with his mother in Korea, since he can’t be prosecuted more than 15 years after his crime. Meanwhile Philip is trying to protect a girl like himself from her abusive Korean father, and is prostituting himself to yet another Korean crook, the owner of a cheap hostel. By the time this pressure-cooker situation explodes, Lee has given us a near-expressionist vision of life in the slums, a comprehensive demolition of the attitudes of Korean émigrés--and a lot of very nasty sex. There’s something heroic about this film, and not just because of the extraordinary way it was made.

-- Tony Rayns

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