Kim and Bouillot: The Man Who Paints Waterdrops
Oan Kim and Brigitte Bouillot are their full names.
This text is written by festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic.
A superb documentary work that ranks in style with the films of some of the most important French authors.
This is a story that introduces us to the dark inner spaces of a man crucified between Korea and France, to the spaces of a personal history inextricably intertwined with the history of a nation, to the spaces of colours, paintings and painting, to the immeasurable space between the painter and the fluid surface of the canvas, to the microcosm of innumerable droplets. This is an exciting personal search and a refined essay on art and the artist. Together with Brigitte Bouillot, Oan Kim tells the story of his father, one of the most important contemporary artists in South Korea. This is the story about the dilemmas and secrets that the son faces when trying to make a study of the father, a study in which close up shots of his always unusually pensive father are intertwined with the shots of his work. This precisely captured meditative peace is filled with additional flow of oneiric fragments of drama and unrest. Authors create together the film as a perfectly constructed puzzle where the last, smallest piece will give the final meaning to the whole story. In a musically precise rhythm, in a slow pace, the authors build a real cinematic tension that keeps the viewers nailed from the beginning to the end of the film.
This is a film about a secret hidden in depths of a torn being who turned into a charismatic artist so that he could testify to the world about the beauty that rises above the dark abyss.
France, South Korea 2021, 79 minutes
