What's Up, Doc?

I attended 2 screenings at Hot Docs, the documentary film festival in Toronto. The first film is Korean Wedding Chest by Ulrike Ottinger.

In Korean Wedding Chest, new and old wedding rituals are explored by Ottinger. Without a narrator, we are left to ponder the meaning of the rituals on our own. Sometimes, a participant may clue us in; for example, a shop-keeper at a wedding store explained the various items that goes into a Korean wedding chest. I particularly enjoyed looking at the old rituals such as the wedding chest or the traditional tea ceremony (similar to that of Chinese weddings). Some of the cheesiness of a modern wedding (which North American weddings are also not exempt from) also got some chuckles.

However, the lack of explanation short-changed or deceived the viewer with respect to other rituals. At the beginning, there were scenes involving a shamaness and also a temple called The Temple of Wish-Fulfillment. But these were not tied in to the wedding that comprised the bulk of the film. It was unclear to me how a shamaness might be involved in a Korean wedding. Does she preside over some weddings? Regarding the temple, do people get married there? Do they come with their sweethearts and swear their love or get engaged?

Other rituals presented would involve so few Koreans or are not even Korean-specific that it seems disingenuous to include in the film. One showed a couple getting a picture from a booth. This picture has been rendered by the machine into an "oil painting". Other options include pencil sketch, watercolour, etc. Well, I saw a functionally identical booth at my local mall. Another scene had couples declaring their love by writing their names on a "padlock of love" and chaining it to a fence along with other love padlocks. A quick search on the internet reveals that this fad probably started in Europe in recent years, and given that the love fence is located on top of a single building in Seoul, this non-Korean expression would statistically be practiced by a tiny, tiny minority of Koreans. As such, it has about as much relevance as showing teens writing "K+L 4ever" on bus seats in a film about North American wedding rituals.

3 thumbs up (out of 5).