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It is definitely not easy for a film company to produce one film per year for 13 years. You gotta have resources, time, sincere efforts and guts. In that sense, National Human Rights Commission of Korea is a very reliable film company, producing 13 films with 52 directors, beginning with If You Were Me in 2003. This year as well, National Human Rights Commission of Korea has released their own products, Fourth Place and If You Were Me. Both movies are planned and produced by KIM Min-ah, whose rather long official title is the ‘NHRC Promotion Cooperation and Human Rights Film Planning Officer.’ She told KoBiz all about the 13 years of making human rights films in Korea. 

You have been steadily producing human rights films since 2003. Tell us how it all began. 

These days “human rights” is a common, every day expression, but back then, it was considered kind of remote and hard. So I thought hard how to deliver the message that everything around us has to do with human rights; in other words, how to make this message convincing and easy enough. That’s how I came up with the idea of film. Nothing handles stories better than a film.   

Right from the very first film, If You Were Me, you have a group of great directors, including YIM Soon-rye, JEONG Jae-eun, YEO Kyun-dong, PARK Jin-pyo, PARK Kwang-su and PARK Chan-wook.

I had a chance to work with such great directors thanks to director LEE Hyeon-seung and NAM Gyu-seon, my senior. LEE was a kind of bridge to relate this project to domestic film directors. NAM had the courage to protect the project even though some of the films were not exactly what we had in mind. 
 
You kept working with great directors for later films too. How did you do it? 

They were like, “Since my great senior directors worked on this project, it is now my turn.” I don’t think I have any special knowhow. I guess it is the power of the project itself, which has been running long enough.

Could you tell us how a human rights film is made, from the planning stage to production?  　

At the beginning of each year, we form what is called Director Search Committee, consisting of film professionals, including producers, film festival programmers and directors. We ask them to recommend three times the number of directors to be actually recruited. Then we meet each director in the list, explain the rationale of this human rights project, and ask if they would join us. For the theme, we stick to the director’s theme if he has one, and otherwise, we suggest our idea. Once the film is complete, we select the distributor and work towards release. Since we do not have a separate budget for distribution, the hardest of all for us is to meet the right distributor. It is absolutely necessary to allocate a separate budget for distribution in the future.   

For omnibus pieces, the production cost is USD 43,000 per piece, and for feature films, USD 170,000 for each. All the films but 2 were 100% government funded. The two films produced with investment from outside are Fly Penguin (2009) and Fourth Place.

You have been producing films for more than 10 years now. What are some of the achievement that you have made inside and outside the films? 

After theater release is over, National Human Rights Commission of Korea turns the films into DVDs and distributes to schools, organizations and institutions. You may as well say that each class room is holding a small version of Human Rights Film Festival, since If You Were Me made 13 years ago is now being used as educational material at school. Teachers like human rights films very much because they feature a whole variety of themes including moving to another country, disability, children and adolescents, temporary worker, skin color, and what not. Once produced, our films are invited to competition and non competition film festivals inside and outside Korea. Since all our films have been invited to film festivals, some of us think that every film in the world is invited to film festivals. (laughs)

Tell us the greatest and hardest moments that you have experienced, making human rights films.

The greatest moment would be when I read reviews from audiences like “Thanks for making films for the minorities that actually care about them. I feel my tax is well used,” or “I appreciate National Human Rights Commission of Korea working on culture.” On the other hand, I get frustrated when I hear responses like “Stop making films that nobody cares,” pointing at the poor performance in terms of numbers. 
 
Your message will be delivered more effectively if your films reach a bigger audience, but your box office performance is not yet very profitable. Do you have a plan for going more popular? 

Of course I wish our films would be seen to a bigger audience, but if human rights films are working towards a big box office success only, then how could we ever protect the kind of values that we wanted to deliver at the first place? I believe our job is to let our films meet those audiences who recognize truthful narratives, even in small size.

Recently you have produced popular feature films like Fourth Place, Fly Penguin and Juvenile Offender (2012). 

Omnibus films accentuate the rupture in real life just like short stories, and feature films show a well balanced story with a clear closure. It is hard to say which is better. However, since the audiences are more interested in the feature film, we would like to go for feature films to build a deeper consensus.