ACF 720: Free screening of "Grandmother's Flower" next Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Grandmother's Flower
Directed by MUN Jeong-Hyun
South Korea, 2008, 89 min.

When: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 @ 7:00 PM
Doors open at 6:30 PM
Where: Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick Street at Canal Street,
one block from the A, C, E and 1 train Canal Street stops

Price: FREE!!!
Seating is first come, first serve.

Grandmother's Flower is the next film in the Korean Cultural Service's current KOREAN MOVIE NIGHT series, which focuses on documentaries.

It's one of the most astonishing documentaries about modern day Korea ever made, but when it begins this documentary sounds terrible. Director Mun Jeong-Hyun is pressured into making a doc about his grandmother, and he's convinced there's no story there, but when he discovers a secret cache of his great uncle’s incomprehensible journals he begins to pull on the threads of his family history, and everything unravels.

Ultimately lifting the lid off his peaceful hometown of Naju, he reveals a hair raising history of conflict between intellectual left wingers and working class right wingers who have been at each other's throats since the Japanese occupation.

A harrowing family saga, it begins with torture, persecution and secret executions and it ends with self-mutilation, decades of discrimination, threats against the filmmaker, and a family exiled over three countri es.

A searing look at what history has done to the Korean people, this is the kind of documentary that keeps upping the ante, finding new realms of pain and suffering to inflict as history has its way with its victims.