Tiger #4 Columbus - kogonada

Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada’s first feature film is an ode to the modernist American city of Columbus (Indiana). Architecture has a leading role in a story about the crisis facing modern Westerners. The director on Columbus:

By: Sophie van Leeuwen & Pieter-Bas van Wiechen

"A few years back, I was driving down the highway with my wife and two sons. I was born and raised in the Midwest but knew nothing about Columbus until I read an article about it in the New York Times. Columbus is modernist architecture’s mecca."

"We stopped the car and I was dumbfounded. I immediately thought: I have to shoot a film here. Columbus is an industrial town, diesel engines were invented there. The rich industrialist Irwin Miller (1909-2004) believed that design changes the world. He attracted young, A-list modern architects and paid them to design public buildings."

"Filming Columbus was great; an unusually beautiful experience. I had never worked with actors before. We only had 18 days for the shoot so that made things challenging."

"The city gave me a story. It’s about the promise and limitations of modernism. Columbus is not the ideal world. It has its issues. That’s what haunted me in the city, like an interesting ghost."

Lonely

"All my characters are lonely. There’s a working class girl, Casey (Haley Lu Richardson). Her most intimate relationships are with buildings, she loves architecture. At the same time, Casey is liberating herself from her mother, an ex-addict."

"Jin is from far away and is trapped in Columbus. All alone. His father, a professor of architecture, is in a coma. The film is about alienation. It is a vision of progress in a conservative city."

"Jin (John Cho) is Korean, like me. He leads an international life and moved to the USA at an early age like I did. His privileged existence also makes him lonely. He has no ties to any culture. I feel that way too."

In love

"My parents are artistic. My mother would end up in theatre my father once said. When I was three they moved to America where they had to work all the time just to survive because there weren’t any other options for them."

"We didn’t talk much. It’s not customary for Korean kids to have intimate conversations with their parents. Besides, there wasn’t even time for breakfast. At the end of the day they’d often drop me at the cinema. In my 20s I truly fell in love with film. I started writing about it. I even wrote a thesis on Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu who is famous for Tokyo Story."

"One day, my brother said to me: 'I'm so surprised that you’re entering academia. I thought you were more creative than that.’ That struck a nerve. I suddenly wondered what I was up to. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I don’t want to write about it, I thought, I want to be part of it!"

Crisis

"There is tension in my film related to class society and meaning. Modernism stands for freedom and progress. It’s a desire for truth and meaning, it represents liberation from the ideas of the past."

"There's a conflict there. There is a crisis of meaning in the West. How can we find meaning? The world keeps on accelerating. And its religious past is diametrically opposed to rationalism."

"Whether art has any meaning or not haunts me. Is art solely decorative? I believe that architecture and film can definitely make a difference. They have a political and societal context. They make us more human."

Rotterdam

"I've never been to International Film Festival Rotterdam, but I am eager to go. The city is so determined by modern architecture. I am definitely also going to make time to see some of Rotterdam’s buildings."

"IFFR has a unique sense of cinema. I’ve always wanted to go. People I know have been quite often and for many of them, it’s their favourite festival. I am proud to be able to screen my film there. I can’t wait to be part of the community."

"Cinema means everything to me. I hope to keep making films. What I love about cinema and architecture is that it’s like having a really long conversation. It’s all about what it means to be human. About what truth looks like in this day and age."