The Canadian Screen Awards (our national answer to the Oscars) are just around the corner, and Xavier Dolan’s Mommy threatens to suck up all the oxygen in the room, which is too bad since there’s a far more worthy competitor in the mix. In Her Place is a powerhouse drama set in a Korean farmhouse, where a city woman visits to secretly adopt a child, and the tensions are assuredly stirred by writer/director Albert Shin.
The Newmarket native and York U grad had been developing his sophomore feature for five years, and the effort payed off. The Toronto Film Critics Association awarded Shin their Jay Scott Prize for emerging artist, while TIFF gave the film a spot on its Canada’s Top Ten list. And then there are the seven CSA nominations, including best director, opposite Dolan, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg.
In Her Place is set to open in Toronto this week, so I sat down with Shin over some Bowmore and Hakka to discuss the film, its place in Canadian cinema and the unique path it took to get here.
In Her Place really overwhelms you with this tangible, ominous mood, as if you can feel the dread in the air. It’s a domestic drama, yet it feels like we’re tiptoeing through something menacing.
I wanted to make a film with a sinister undertone that slowly creeps up on you. When you get to the end, you feel like you’ve gone a really long distance. Thematically it starts as one thing and ends as something else. Also, I realize that the story goes to a very dark place. I wanted to play with that without making an overt genre film. Korean cinema is known for a lot of shock value. There’s stuff in my film that’s shocking, but I didn’t want it to be a thrill. Instead of thrills, I wanted an uneasy presence throughout.
You were raised here but managed to make a film that feels authentically Korean. How connected do you feel to Korean culture?
I feel connected, but maybe it would be insulting to Koreans to say I am of Korean culture. I never lived there, went to school or served in the military there – all things real Koreans have to do. I grew up in Newmarket. I eat fried chicken and hamburgers. At the same time, I grew up in a very Korean home. I used to spend every single summer from when I was six to my teens living with my aunts and uncles and grandparents. Whenever I go to Korea, I feel strangely at peace and at home there. I definitely have some connection, whatever that may be. That gave me the confidence that I could make this film. I also like the idea that I’m not entirely Korean. I didn’t want to emulate the local directors out there who are making fabulous films. I wanted to bridge whatever my influences are that are Canadian with Korean content.
I don’t think there’s another national cinema as outward-looking as Canadian cinema. Water, Congorama, Incendies, Rebelle and Siddharth are just a few examples of Canadian films that take place elsewhere.
Filmmakers around my age are from all sorts of places in the world. We want to look outwards, not just inwards. Maybe it’s Canadian for us to do that. My producing partner, Igor Drljaca, came to Canada from Bosnia during the war in Sarajevo. All of his films, even the ones that take place here, are about Bosnia. That’s the conflict that’s within him. He lives a pretty peaceful life here in Toronto, but what haunts him at night is his time hiding from sniper fire when he was about nine years old. I think that’s where drama comes from.
There’s an origin story about how you were inspired to make this film after eavesdropping on diners at a restaurant in Korea. They were gossiping about a woman and suggesting that she’s secretly adopting a child. But there’s another layer to this film’s origin story. I met your wife, Niki, and found out your relationship with her began with this film.
Yes. I went to Korea to attend a film festival while also taking some time to write scripts, searching for a story I wanted to tell. I met Niki at the film festival. She was living there as a teacher. She encouraged me to write, and she wanted to write as well. We were pushing each other to focus, because I was procrastinating a lot. So we would get together and write.
During that time I had the restaurant experience, where I overheard people chatting about a secret adoption, which reminded me of stories I heard growing up. I ended up talking to Niki after I overheard the discussion. She was like, “You need to write this story. This is what you need to do.”
I went back to Canada and kept thinking about it. I was trying to find every excuse not to do it. “It’s not the right story. I’m barely Korean. Why do I want to make a film about women? This is not for me.” But this is the one that lingered. I ended up going back out to Korea and working on it properly. There was also the bonus motivation, which was visiting Niki.
That’s when you actually started researching for the film?
I went back to Korea and did the formal legwork, finding out about secret adoptions and how they work. I was able to talk to people who found out they were secretly adopted and also women who gave up their children, mainly because of the stigma of being a single parent or teenage mother.
I understand this is a very micro-budgeted film, but by looking at it you would never know. How did you manage to get the financing and work around budget issues?
I had this farm location that belonged to my family that was just sitting there rotting away. Coming from the DIY filmmaking world, where you have to make due with what’s at your disposal, I knew I could use this location because it’s visually interesting.
I don’t know if I was eligible for public funding since it’s a very Korean film. I had a sense of how to keep the costs down since I had already made these super-indie no-budget films. I thought this was a budget I could raise. This was in 2010, before Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I’m saying it like it’s a long time ago, but a lot has changed since then. I was fundraising, just asking family and friends for a little more than a little bit of money.
So I shot it in Korea. It would take place in that one location, and I was able to couch surf with relatives and eat their food. I could use whatever I raised just to shoot the film. At the time, I didn’t even have enough for post-production. But when I came back to Canada, my company with Igor Drljaca, TimeLapse Pictures, had a little bit of money from previous films. So we just poured everything we had into post-production.
The movie is clearly a success, with the all the praise and awards you’ve been receiving. Before that payoff, how much did you have riding on this film?
All I know is movies. I don’t have any trade skills. I made this film and can only hope that people let me make another one. I put everything I could into this movie, doing things I would never do, asking people for money, spending two years of my life in Korea, going back and forth. I truly believed in my heart that I was going all in. I realized that if this film didn’t turn out, I would never be able to go back to people and ask for money, that I might never get to do this again.
And you almost lost it all when your hard drive crashed?
Back when I wasn’t thinking, “Man I hope I beat out David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan for the CSA,” before those thoughts ever crossed my mind, I was just so excited to play TIFF. I finished the film and it was ready to go – all I had to do was make the master copy. I was doing some cursory little fixes, and the hard drive just died.
I was like, “That’s okay, I have a backup.” I opened it, and the backup had not backed up things properly. So I had a film that I had shot in Korea with my life savings and everybody else’s money, it’s three or four weeks before it was going to premiere at TIFF, and it just vanished. Films are just sitting on computers and hard drives nowadays, and those entities had just broken down. I had two weeks to figure this out and deliver to TIFF. I lost 10 years of my life in that two-week span.
Just through blind luck, I had misplaced a missing ingredient file on a different hard drive. I was saved by a lucky accident. Once I inputted that file, everything locked back into place, and everything was right with the world.
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