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WASHINGTON -- Park Jin-Pyo discussed his film, “Too Young to Die,” with an enthusiastic audience during a post-screening Q&A session at Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium on May 18 here.

The movie is part of the Korean Film Festival. Fourteen films from recent years are being screened till June in four different venues. (Visit www.asia.si.edu/KoreanFilm2007 for more information and a complete schedule.)

            “Too Young to Die” is the first feature film made by Park, a South Korean TV producer and documentary director. The film captures the poignant details of the love affair between two septuagenarians, who love with the sexual and emotional intensity of teenagers. Well regarded in the international festival circuit, the movie was originally banned in South Korea due to the explicit sex scenes. 

During the Q&A, Park talked about his intention to dispel the stereotype of the elderly with his film.

”Love is the same for everybody and doesn’t change.  I want people to know that the elderly can lead healthy lives,” Park said through an interpreter.  “And that they are also men and women before they are fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers.”

“I encourage the elderly people here to have the courage to love.  My parents used to sleep in two twin-size beds, but after they saw the movie, they bought a queen-size bed,” he added with a mischievous smile.

Tom Vick, Freer Gallery’s film programmer who, along with University of Maryland scholar Hyunjun Min, organized this year’s festival, pointed out that one of the features of recent Korean films is their ingenious take on genre conventions.

“(Korean) films are different from what we see in Hong Kong where you can kind of expect what to see in an action movie or comedy.  They play with the ideas (of genre convention) in very interesting ways,” Vick said.  “It’s very refreshing, and that’s what makes Korean movies so interesting these days.”

“Murder, Take One," also a personal recommendation of Vick’s, certainly embodies that genre-bending quality.  On first look a crime thriller, the movie gradually spins into very different dimensions, especially as the murder investigation is transformed into a reality TV show. 

The emergence of young directors also brings South Korea’s film industry new energy. “A lot of these films are made by people who have made only one or two films, or maybe their debut films.  Young people with great ideas are coming up and emerging in Korean cinema,” said Vick.

An example is “In Between Days,” So Yong Kim’s debut feature in 2006 about a shy teenage Korean immigrant in Canada who struggles to deal with her isolation in a strange land.  It also won a special jury prize at the Sundance Festival last year.

Another notable film in June, “The President’s Last Bang” by Im Sang-Soo, is a political satire that chronicles the 1979 assassination of Korean president Park Chun-hee and the corruption and cronyism during his regime.