A Comedy About the Worst Possible Set ¹

A comedy about a film set quietly falling apart, and the small role it played in Lim Sun-woo's second debut as an adult actor.

The premise is a small, mean joke about film sets: an actor named Min-gyeong is cast as the lead in a short film, and as the shoot goes on, the set quietly comes apart and a rift opens between her and the director. That is the entire synopsis given in the Korean Film Archive's own programme note, and it is not more complicated than that on the page — the film's reputation rests on how the joke actually plays, which we have not seen for ourselves.²

Please Don't Direct a Movie — a literal rendering of the Korean title; at least one film database lists it in English as Between You and Me, a title we could not connect to anything in the synopsis or reviews we hold. — was directed by Lee Dae-young and runs 14 minutes.

It won Best Picture in the comedy strand — 희극지왕, literally "comedy king" — at the 16th Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, held 29 June to 5 July 2017,³ one of Korea's more closely watched short-film competitions for emerging directors. The following year it was picked up for EBS's Independent Cinema Theatre broadcast slot, paired with two other shorts, and screened again at the Korean Film Archive's Cinematheque KOFA as part of a shorts programme.²

None of that makes it a well-known film outside the festival circuit that made it, which is the ordinary condition of almost everything in this section. What makes it worth a piece here is smaller and more specific: it is one of the two films Lim Sun-woo made in 2017, the year of her adult re-debut, and the more prize-worthy of the two.

One loose thread we want to be honest about. Aggregated cast listings for this film give the director character's role to an actor named Moon Hye-in — the same name, but not necessarily the same person, as the actor whose profile ran in Issue One. We looked for a primary cast list to settle it and could not find one. Given how often two different working actors have turned out to share a name over the course of just this issue and the last, we are not going to guess, and we are not linking the two profiles on this site on the strength of a name alone.

For the actor whose second debut this film is actually about, read the profile of Lim Sun-woo. For the school she returned to that same year, read the KNUA piece.

1. ¹ SAMPLE COPY — preview build, not a published piece. Please Don't Direct a Movie is a real, released short film. This piece is written from a Korean Film Archive programme note and aggregated press coverage, not from a screening: no Second Look Korea editor has seen it. Nothing here is a verified review until fact and legal review is complete.
2. ² Synopsis and screening history per the Korean Film Archive (Korean Film Council Cinematheque KOFA), "단편 섹션 3" programme note, and aggregated Korean press coverage of its 2018 EBS Independent Cinema Theatre broadcast.
3. ³ 16th Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival (29 June – 5 July 2017), Best Picture, Comedy strand (희극지왕 부문 최우수작품상).

TITLE

Please Don't Direct a Movie · 감독님 연출하지 마세요

DIRECTOR

Lee Dae-young

FORMAT

2017 · 14 min · short

REVIEWED IN

Issue Two