In Between Days
credits:
Director: So Yong KimProducer: Bradley Rust Gray
Writers: So Yong Kim, Bradley Rust Gray
Cast: Ji-Seon Kim, Tae-gu Andy Kang, Bok-ja Kim, Gina Kim
USA/Canada/South Korea 2006 | 83 mins | HDCAM | English, Korean
One of the most critically praised American independent features to emerge recent years, So Yong Kim1s mesmerizing and minimalist IN BETWEEN DAYS is that rarest of films, a debut so brilliant and distinctive that it has the power to transform the way we look at Asian American cinema. Winner of a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at Sundance and the FIPRESCI award at Berlin, featuring an incredible cast of non-professionals and a spellbinding soundtrack (with Sigur Ros, Electrelane and Asobi Seksu), Kim’s film is a loving and highly personal poem to the confusing, wintry worlds of adolescence.
“As the title suggests, the terrain of So Yong Kim’s IN BETWEEN DAYS—best film in [Sundance’s] dramatic competition—is the ghost world of teenage alienation. The coming-of-age mopefest is a Sundance staple, but the first-time Korean American director’s watchful, intelligent minimalism modestly reanimates the genre. Recently arrived from Korea, Aimie (a wonderfully ingenuous performance by Ji-Seon Kim) lives with her single mother in a bleak Toronto housing block, sending video diaries to the father who left them, unsure of how to handle a growing crush on her best friend. It’s a portrait of a friendship under subliminal stress, and a study of the daily trials of assimilation. Painful, funny, unsentimental, perfectly measured in its ambiguities, it’s exemplary low-budget filmmaking, the rare DV movie with an assured visual style and a strong sense of place, moving between the claustrophobic sanctuary of a teenager’s pink bedroom and evocative in-between spaces like bus shelters and highway overpasses“ (Dennis Lim, Village Voice).
—Chi-hui Yang
