Kelley Dong
By Kelley Dong Hidden in the grassy seaside of northwestern Jutland, the matronly Sommai has arranged for hundreds of marriages between Thai women and Danish men for more than 30 years. Between 2007 and 2018, documentarian Janus Metz (Borg vs McEnroe) and anthropologist Sine Plambech (Trafficking) closely followed Sommai and her construction of a migration…
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By Kelley Dong In Carmel Winters’ Float Like a Butterfly, a police altercation on the grounds of an Irish Traveller encampment culminates in the death of a young mother and the arrest of her husband. This tragedy inspires their daughter Frances’ (Hazel Doupe) dream to become a great fighter like Muhammad Ali. But unlike Ali,…
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By Kelley Dong In Selma Vilhunen’s sophomore feature Stupid Young Heart, white nationalism exists as a necessary evil during a young boy’s rite of passage. Routinely bullied for his small stature, Finnish teenager Lenni (Jere Ristseppä) oscillates between reticence and bouts of anger. Kiira (Rosa Honkonen), Lenni’s hip-hop dancing classmate, is pregnant with his child.…
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By Kelley Dong All play and no work is a dangerous game in Too Late to Die Young, the third feature by Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor, winner of the Golden Leopard for Best Director at this year’s Locarno festival. Recalls the dreamy, pastoral pastels of painter George Seurat, the film is set in 1990 and…
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By Kelley Dong “For me the vast open field of the unknown and the prison existed simultaneously.” — Kim Hye-soon, “Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream” After a string of US-funded anti-communist documentaries and neorealist melodramas, Korean director Kim Ki-young entered a new phase of his filmmaking with the wildly successful “Housemaid Trilogy,” comprising The Housemaid (1960) and its…
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