A little bit of history - An Ode To My Father & Taklub

For Filmed in Ether, two Reviews From Biff.
One from the Philippines and the other from Korea.
Two very different films but both are dealing with major events in their respective countries.
Actually in style and how they deal with history they are poles apart.
Taklub from Brillante Mendoza is gritty realism dealing with the aftermath of the super typhoon Haiyan. It is a empathetic observation of life after a disaster where the psychological scares are greater than the physical wreckage. The setting is Tacloban which was literally leveled through wind, rain and waves and the film follows a handful of survivors. It is a far from sensational observation of the heartbreak involved with picking up the pieces.

This is the life of a devastated community waiting to be relocated, waiting for life to be returned to normal, waiting in vain for promised relief beyond daily rations and a canvas roof over their heads. They live with the guilt of a survivor, the fear of the next storm bringing a new tsunami and the want of life’s basics and wanting a place that they can call home.

 read the full review here

Brillante Mendoza

 













Ode To My Father from Yoon Je-kyoon differs greatly in that it spans Korean history from the end of the civil war, or at least when there was a truce on the fighting, right up to the present. It's epic in scale, in production value and in box office takings. The treatment of the history is a lot more stylised and sentimental. This is a tear jerker of a film.

Ode to My Father is the story of one man, Yoon Deok-soo (Hwang Jung-min) who dedicates his life to the service of his family and the nation after his father gets left behind in the mass evacuation from the northern Korean port of Hungnam toward the end of the war. His life is hard and his tales are epic but some say that it is a romanticised and sycophantic rewriting of history. Certainly right wing elements of this society have hijacked the film for their own purposes. When it was released earlier this year, the director in fact stopped doing interviews because the focus was solely on this subject.

 read the full review here

Yoon Je-kyoon

Both are fine films but in very different ways and they both come from very fine filmmakers.