Korea Tour: Por Que Corea? with Sofia Ferrero Carrega

Published: Feb. 18, 2015, 6:08 p.m.

At a coffee house somewhere in Busan, Colin talks with\xa0Sof\xeda Ferrero C\xe1rrega, film critic and enthusiast of Korean cinema. They discuss whether she'd recommend other movie-lovers move to Busan; how the Busan International Film Festival attracted her to the city (and the importance of its parties); why, in Busan, "everybody says yes"; the state of Korean film criticism in Spanish; how she first encountered Korean cinema, and how its auteurs got her to know Korea; the bad first impression Korean culture can sometimes give\xa0on film; what happens when you mention kimchi in Argentina; why\xa0her move\xa0to Korea\xa0became\xa0inevitable; her experience of understanding nothing in Korea even after having studied the language for years\xa0before arriving; what makes the dialogue in Hong Sangsoo movies easier to understand than the dialogue in other movies (and why Korea struck her as a real-life Hong Sangsoo movie when she arrived); whether she feels a kinship with Isabelle Huppert's character in\xa0In Another Country; the shock of finding out that, in Korea, she's white; the understanding she gets by standing outside society, and the "healthy jealousy" she feels for those inside; the difference between Korean conception of history and the Argentine conception of history; how\xa0Korea's heavily advertised matchmaking services speak to the cultural importance of marriage; why to learn about a culture from its independent films, not his mainstream one; how Korean social life "flows" from one place to the next; the role\xa0of the Seoul International Women's Film Festival; what happened in the world of Korean film festivals in the wake of the Sewol disaster, and how all the elements aligned to match the national mood; what it felt like to live in a silent Korea; the strong identification within Korean generations; her critical interest in connecting Korean film to the conditions\xa0in Korean society; why she waited on reading about Korea until she'd lived here a while, then picked up\xa0Michael Breen's\xa0The Koreans; the difficulty of explaining Korean food and drink to friends and family back in Argentina; the Korean penchant for "crowded" food and "crowded" web sites; how the culture has turned her "no"s into "ne"s; and what hour she (as well as\xa0the Argentine ambassador) woke\xa0up to watch the World Cup.