In the vibrant days of his youth, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho encountered a group of extraordinary souls, united by a single connection: a love of cinema. Before achieving global recognition, Bong Joon-Ho was an ordinary college student who dreamed of making films. With a group of graduate students and other film buffs, Bong created a film club, which he called 'Yellow Door'.
Lee Hyuk-Rae, who was also an alumnus of the club, produced a moving and inspiring documentary Yellow Door: 90s Lo-Fi Film Club on Netflix. Meeting with former club members, Lee and Bong reminisced about the good old days of the '90s, when college life was as pleasant as the color palette in a Wes Anderson movie.
Director: Lee Hyuk-rae
Stars: Bong Joon Ho, Ren Hanami, Ahn Nae-sang
In 1992, the "Yellow Door" movie club was founded on the second floor of a building in Seogyo-dong. During this time, Bong Joon-Ho was a graduate student in sociology, while the other members of the club came from other departments. In that bygone era, when movies weren't as accessible as they are now, Bong and his fellow moviegoers often relied on pirated VHS tapes.
They used to make copies of those tapes, which were labeled by Bong himself. Bong was not only an admirer of cinema, but he also devotedly studied those films. He used to analyze them, any particular scene from those films, and even draw those sequences as a storyboard. Not only Bong, but everyone in the club, used to analyze those films, studying them and researching them. There were some textbooks created by the club members that contained those film analyzes along with the storyboards created by Bong Joon-Ho. He showed one of those drawings of a scene from The Godfather. However,
later, while Bong was sharing the same stage as Coppola, he told her how he had analyzed The Godfather during the time when he was young and ran a film club. Bong's love for cinema was not only limited to watching movies, he began making movies from that very moment. As soon as he was able to purchase a camcorder, Bong shot his first animated film, Looking for Paradise. This movie featured nothing more than a stuffed gorilla and a caterpillar made of clothing. Finding Paradise was nothing more than Bong's abridged experimental animated film, but each of the club members found a different interpretation of the film. Some of them could relate to the gorilla and his journey to find paradise, while others struggled to remember the exact details of the film.
Not all members of the Cinephile Club have pursued a film career. Some of them are now teachers, businessmen and photographers, while others like Kim Hyung-oak, Choi-jong and Lee Hyuk-rae made their careers in film. But still, the documentary's maker, Lee, managed to bring almost everyone together to remember their bonding days. Some of them could remember their discussions on semiotics and how they used to mispronounce 'signifier' and 'signify'.
During their discussion, one of them mentioned that they used to order a lot of food during their discussions and ask the delivery boys. to take the food to the second floor, near a yellow door. That's how his little club of movie buffs got the name 'Yellow Door'. Dae-yup, one of the club members, was largely responsible for the aesthetics of 'Yellow Door'. He suggested that the entire office should be painted yellow, and everyone agreed.
More and more film buffs joined their club, and it was understandable that many more such clubs were created in the surrounding area, encouraging students to flock there, driven by their love of cinema. Bong's funny theory behind this was that the government must have put something in the water supply, causing everyone to become movie buffs. However, later, not everyone's path aligned with Bong Joon-ho's, some saw it as regret and others respected his own decisions. One of those members, Hoon-a, was able to remember the time when he met Bong after a long time and wondered how he had chosen film as a career. For her, watching movies was just her hobby, which she never felt like pursuing as a profession.
Yellow Door: 90s Lo-fi Film Club does not have any particular linear narrative style, but is decorated with all the fragments of those nostalgic moments and discussions between those friends who met each other after a long time. The film showed some of the old images of young Bong and his friends, which evoked great nostalgia. This documentary is in every sense a beautiful recounting of events.
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