Love Talk

Colour, 35 mm
Korea, 2005, 118 min
IP – International premiere
Section: Official Selection - Competition

Synopsis

The young woman Young-shin sits behind the microphone at the radio station where she works, a friendly ear for lonely people: Californian Koreans phone in to her programme “Love Talk” and share their sorrows and pain with her. But Young-shin is troubled by the same problems as her listeners. While she has achieved everything she came to America to find – freedom, money, education – she is stumbling along, cut off from her own past, alone in this radiant and vast urban landscape. She is therefore affected all the more acutely by a chance encounter with a lover from the distant past, Ji-seok, who has set out for L. A. to search for his own dream, of which Young-shin has always been a part… Director Lee Yoon-ki has surrounded this romance, captured in long, silent and curiously drained shots, with fragments of the lives of many other Asian emigrants, and has thus transformed it into a parable about the nostalgia and hopes of those who pass through their lives as they do foreign cities.

About the director

Lee Yoon-ki (b. 1965, Daejeon, Korea), after leaving school, set out for the United States where he studied economics at the University of Southern California. He also used this education in film – during the mid-1990s he began producing short films for his Korean colleagues. He concurrently started making his own films and took his short My Kind of Love to compete in the Seoul Film Festival in 1995. In 2004 he debuted with the feature This Charming Girl (Yeoja, jeong-hye) and, after it brought him an award at the Pusan IFF, he took it to other leading international festivals, including Sundance and Berlin. The filmmaker, one of the greatest talents in Korean cinema, also introduces the intimate poetic style of this film, which audiences would have seen at last year’s KV festival, in his latest work, Love Talk, in which he draws on his own experiences as a Korean immigrant living in Los Angeles.