Within each of us, we share multiple stories and values that make us feel unexpectedly connected. Yet, each of us is a unique mix of various personality traits, with different upbringings and experiences that distinguish us from each other. The same goes for films, as much as the film is related to you, there will always be a distinction that puts a distance between you and the film. I felt the impression through watching two of Jackson Segars’ filmography, Kimchi (2018), where he worked as the director, and The Chicken (2020), which he produced.
These two films remind me that humans need to belong for the sake of a relationship with other people. As for someone who moves from one place to another, I had to settle and alter my identity based on the place I live in, hoping to have a connection within the society where I hope to belong. When I lived in Bandung to study, there was a time when I forced myself to hang around with as many new people as possible even though I felt very exhausted to do it. I find my struggles resonate with both protagonists in Kimchi and The Chicken, who are trying to find belonging, through the lens of a migrant.
Kimchi tells the story of Ken, a Japanese man meeting his Korean girlfriend’s family for the first time and makes an unlikely connection with her grandfather. And then The Chicken tells the story of Hiro, a young Japanese immigrant in New York City who cannot bring himself to butcher a live chicken after mishandling a medical emergency he witnesses on the streets.
Through Kimchi, Ken tried to have a sense of belonging in her girlfriend’s Korean family by learning the Korean language. In doing so, Ken wanted to make himself less of a foreigner in her family. Instead of language, it was a camera that made Ken find a connection with her girlfriend’s grandfather. As for The Chicken, Hiro started to think about moving from New York to Siberia, even though he has an established life ahead of him. Hiro’s sense of belonging towards New York was shrinking when he felt that New York wouldn’t be able to provide a good quality of life for his future.
From the synopsis alone, Kimchi and The Chicken sound like a slice-of-life drama centered around two Japanese protagonists, but these two films have more to say than they already have. The meeting between Ken and his girlfriend’s grandfather in Kimchi can be interpreted as the impact of historical ties to World War II between Korea and Japan. The filmmaker chose to not explicitly show this, nor maybe it was not his main focus in the beginning. But Segars’ delicate way of showing it through the dialogue and the slow pacing tells us a lot about their strangely deep-rooted connection.
In The Chicken, the slice-of-life expands on the ways that structural violence subconsciously permeates daily life, Neo Sora carefully shows violence through the actions of killing a chicken, the police presence at a restaurant wearing body armor and assault rifle, and the elder howling in pain on the sidewalk, which I failed to see as violence because it looks very normalized to me during the first watch. It was until I had the opportunity to hear Segars’ opinion as the producer during the Hybrid Internship Minikino Film Week Festival Writers program about his perspective on how violence is displayed throughout the film.
Though there are similar elements that Kimchi and The Chicken have, they took different scopes of focus that impacted the way they maintain a relationship between the audience and the story. Kimchi tells a personal experience (as Segars said during our meeting, the idea came from his visit as a Japanese-American to his partner’s family home). As it’s set in a home, we had a lot of space to observe them through the mise-en-scène and close-ups of their expressions. Those things create the feeling of intimacy and personal connection between the audience and the characters in Kimchi.
Rather than personal, The Chicken gives a certain distance between the audience and the characters by having lots of space to see the bigger picture. For instance, we saw them in a house wanting to kill a live chicken for dinner, in a restaurant talking about the possible gentrification of Siberia, and in the street getting health access for a stranger despite the stranger not giving them consent for it. The camera in The Chicken barely lets us observe their expressions, but allows us to see the environment that usually takes up the space of the frame.
The difference in similarities between Kimchi and The Chicken is what makes it convenient to watch back-to-back. Kimchi makes us pay attention to the small details, but The Chicken makes us see the bigger picture. I sense that Jackson Segars intended to have films that provide a poignant examination of the immigrant experience in America while serving as a reflection of society’s internalized and externalized fear, and he succeeded in doing so.
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