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No one could have guessed that another flurry of sweeping changes was just around the corner. Soon after the first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 20, 2020, South Korea entered a pandemic lockdown, changing the face of the Korean film industry. As in other countries, the airborne virus made going to the movies unviable, and the lost foot traffic was directed instead to streaming platforms. Consequently, the Korean Film Council’s funding program, which is subsidized by collecting 3% of every theatrical ticket sale, took a critical hit. The Korean ecosystem of independent productions that relied on state funding ended up in shambles.
Because PINKS’s films had always been at odds with the mainstream and geared toward a loyal, ideologically aligned audience, the industry-wide setbacks were not as detrimental to them. When the Council funding became unavailable, the members again took on more part-time gigs and focused on expanding the grassroots donations to take advantage of the collective’s greatest assets: small-scale operation and resourcefulness. In fact, they hit some milestones during the pandemic.
In 2021, PINKS launched PINKS Academy, a documentary lab initiative to provide mentorship and production help for aspiring filmmakers. Through the Academy, PINKS mentored eight emerging filmmakers. The Academy experience reaffirmed their conviction that they had an important role to play in ushering in a new generation of documentarians, and they soon launched a similar program called PINKS Playground, which helped five young documentarians, all involved in the South Korean Coalition for Anti-discrimination Legislation, produce individual shorts about their struggle. These shorts were collected in an anthology film, What Bounds Us (2023), which was screened at the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival in 2022.
Around the time the Academy was launched, Byun’s second directorial feature, Coming to You (2021), won numerous awards at the Jeonju International Film Festival and DMZ. A moving portrait of Parents, Families, and Allies of LGBTAIQ+ People in Korea (PFLAG Korea), the film tenderly gazes at how queer children and their families overcome the generational divide and fight for LGBTQ rights in the country. PINKS and the members of PFLAG Korea traveled with the film to more than one hundred community and impact screenings, both domestically and internationally. To their surprise, Coming to You went on to receive a three-year licensing deal from Netflix.
“It’s a nice feeling being able to tell people ‘it’s on Netflix’ instead of asking them to gather like-minded folks and organize a community screening,” says Byun, connecting the Netflix deal to increased accessibility, thereby boosting the film’s chance of contributing to greater queer acceptance in the country. At the same time, accessibility can be a thorny question for the PINKS films that document marginalized people for whom anonymity is directly tied to their physical safety. Over the years, several streaming platforms have been interested in acquiring past works, but PINKS has declined many of the offers due to concerns about the possibilities of doxxing and other material harms.
According to Kim, movie theaters, although still public spaces, come with a certain degree of safety and insularity that streaming cannot guarantee. While the streaming model helps the collective’s documentaries reach more audiences, it forces them to be more careful about their relationship with the subjects. “Depending on the theme or the kind of people appearing in a given film, the traditional exhibition model is more desirable. This inevitably impacts a wide range of aesthetic choices I make,” Kim shares.
This issue is immediately pertinent to PINKS’s most recent film Edhi Alice. Amid the recent resurgence of transphobia in Korea, Kim has had extensive conversations with its eponymous transgender protagonists about the film’s potential unintended consequences. As the collective has grown and garnered larger critical and commercial successes, the weight of their responsibilities both as documentarians and activists has become that much heavier.
On December 3, 2024, before PINKS could fully savor the successful premiere of Edhi Alice at IDFA, now-impeached South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol attempted a coup with a sudden martial law proclamation, which lasted for approximately six hours. On the night of the assault on the country’s democracy, millions of Koreans took to the streets to demand Yoon’s immediate impeachment—much as they did back in 2016—and so did the collective with cameras in their hands. Everything else was put on hold. “Because Korean documentaries have been incubated and nurtured by community screenings organized by activists, our political commitments are inseparable from the form,” Kim explains.
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