F.I.L.M. Series

Event Description

Award-winning filmmakers Ross McElwee and Hyun Kyung Kim present their most recent films, free and open to the public in the Bradford Auditorium, Kirner-Johnson 125. At 2 p.m., McElwee screens Remake (2025), winner of the Golden Globes Impact Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival, in which a central figure of American personal documentary confronts the 2016 death of his son Adrian on film. At 7 p.m., Kim screens Defectors (2023), a Special Jury Award winner at Visions du Réel, tracing what the division of Korea has meant for her own family and for North Korean defectors she knows.

Ross McElwee is a major figure in the history of personal documentary. On December 24, 2016, his son Adrian died of an opioid overdose at McElwee's home, and for years afterward it was unclear whether he would film again. Remake traces the history that led to that death, and in doing so confronts the hardest question of McElwee's career: whether a filmmaker who has spent a lifetime turning his own life into cinema can face his son's death the same way.

The Korean Armistice Agreement "ended" the Korean War in 1953 and left two separate Koreas behind — along with marriages and families divided by the border and by the decades since. In Defectors, Hyun Kyung Kim examines what that separation has meant for her own family, for herself, and for people she knows who defected from North Korea.

Support for F.I.L.M. events is provided by the Dean of Faculty Office, the Kirkland Endowment, and the Cinema and Media Studies Program.

Events are curated and organized by Professor of Cinema and Media Studies Scott MacDonald.