KAFFNY ’11: Wet Sand: Voices From LA

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s 2004 film Wet Sand: Voices From LA is her follow up to her 1993 film Sa-I-Gu (reviewed here) and is her attempt at creating a wider picture of the 1992 LA Riots and is screening as part of the Korean American Film Festival New York in their Dai Sil Kim-Gibson retrospective. The KAFFNY will screen Sa-I-Gu: From Korean Women’s Perspectives, Wet Sand: Voices from LA (2004), Olivia’s Story, directed by Charles Burnett (1999), A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans (1995) Motherland (2006) and Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women(1999). You can find the info here. Read my thoughts after the break.

In Wet Sand, Kim-Gibson revisits LA to learn what changes have occurred ten years later and discovers that problems have worsened and the aid that people seemed so hopeful for in Sa-I-Gu was administered in small doses and the community was left in shambles. Though Sa-I-Gu was a personal story of the women that lived through the riots and how there lives were impacted immediately after, Wet Sand interviews a much broader set of ethnic minorities and attempts to probe into the racial and economic issues of not only 1992 LA, but how they currently affect the communities 10 years later.

The documentary takes its title from a quote by Lee Jung-hui the mother of the only Korean killed in the 1992 riots, who was featured heavily in the first documentary. In talking about the unity the Korean community experienced right after the riots she says, “It was like holding wet sand tight in your hand. If you hold a fistful of sand, and the sand is wet it becomes one big lump. But if the sand dries it will slip out of your fingers until there is nothing left.”

Unfortunately this quote can also be attributed to the film as well. In attempting to take on such a complex task Kim-Gibson severely limits herself in terms of running time. She is attempting to weave a complicated pattern from the various threads of her interviews. She starts with the pain of a mothers loss, grounding this film as a growth of her arguments from Sa-I-Gu.

From this violence she widens her scope. There are threads about media depiction of the conflict. There is an interview with the police chief at the time. There is an thread about the Latasha Harlins killing and both attorneys get a chance to talk. There is a thread about African American businesses, as well as a thread about Latino owned businesses. There is thread about the interaction between Latinos and Koreans and Blacks. There is a thread about the changing relationship between Koreans and Blacks. There is a thread about the class divide, which happens to fall in many peoples minds as a racial divide. There is also a thread about educational imbalance and the needs for better funded schools within the community. There is even a thread about gang warfare and the attempt to quell black on black violence.

Kim-Gibson is trying to weave all of these threads into a tapestry of loss and anger and confusion. Unfortunately there are too many for her to handle in such a short time. I felt like I was being dragged away from a potentially enlightening conversation into yet another important question, all without the time to really dig into anything or breath. Is this a bad film? In no way am I saying this. It does bring up important questions that are still important in our society. My sadness is that as a whole all of these things end up falling through the fingers of the film. If this was a longer form documentary, such as Spike Lee has been doing with his New Orleans documentaries, I think she could have done much more. Kim-Gibson is a formidable and important modern voice, but Wet Sand barely gives the viewer time to hear it.

One of the things that KAFFNY is allowing is to decompress this argument a bit. Curating the 19 years later event and putting these films together, as well as having a Q&A will hopefully allow some of these issues time to breathe on their own. This could be the most important event at this year’s KAFFNY. As I’ve said before you should not miss it if you are in NY.

The Dai Sil Kim-Gibson Retrospective with Sa-I-Gu: From Korean Women’s Perspectives, Wet Sand: Voices from LA, Olivia’s Story, directed by Charles Burnett is showing Saturday 3/19, 5-8PM, at the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas w/Q&A tickets can be bought here.