Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival 2008

WEST 32ND

The ascendance of South Korea’s film industry has flowed beyond its borders toward Koreans overseas. A production of CJ Entertainment, Korea’s largest entertainment company, West 32nd represents yet another exciting aspect of Korean cinema that includes the talent of overseas Koreans like director Michael Kang. After exploring adolescence in the backwaters of rural America in his first feature, The Motel (Reel Asian Opening Night, 2005), Kang segues to a contemporary tale of survival from the streets of New York City in West 32nd. What results is an ambitious and stylish mix of Korean new wave and New York grit.

When a Korean teenager is accused of a gang-style murder, an ambitious young lawyer, John Kim (John Cho from the Harold and Kumar franchise), takes on the controversial case pro bono to raise his profile within his firm. John finds added incentive in his client’s sweet and attractive older sister Lila (Grace Park of Battlestar Galactica and CBC’s Edgemont). As he delves into the case John finds an underground Korean community worlds away from his own 2nd generation, all-American ivy-league upbringing. Blindly navigating the community John meets Mike (the magnetic Jun Kim), a rising mid-level gangster who guides him through the neon underworld of hostesses, room salons, and gangs of New York’s Koreatown so that John may better serve his client; or, so it seems. Soon, however, John and Mike’s respective ambitions come to a head with Lila caught in the middle, with volatile results.

Kang takes a firm hold of the New York crime drama genre and plants it firmly on the streets of Koreatown in West 32nd. It shows the sordid side of the immigrant experience; equally violent and exploitative towards its own members in the name of fast money and survival. Furthermore, like its Italian American mob movie analogues, the immigrant and 2nd generation’s relationship to the mean streets of America forms the core of the film and its characters. John, Mike, and Lila steer through their own ambivalence towards the community and find that they can never truly escape it. Along the way Kang has crafted a stylishly entertaining crime drama but also a statement about the pushes and pulls of one’s own community.

Michael Kang’s first feature film, The Motel, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and garnered several awards including the Humanitas Prize, and San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival Jury prize. Most recently, Michael was awarded a fellowship with the ABC/DGA New Talent Television Directing Program.

- Aram Collier



COMMUNITY PARTNERS: North American Association of Asian Professionals, Korean Canadian Lawyers Association