Film buff and York grad Albert Shin finds his place on the big screen

Albert Shin (AS): I was one of those kids that would watch two or three movies a day. Funny enough, the film that set me on this path was a B-grade marital arts film from the ’80 starring Jean-Claude Van Damme called Bloodsport. I was in Grade 1 and my older brother convinced me to watch this film instead of Gremlins, which was very popular at the time. I was hooked. I started watching every martial arts action film I could get my hands on, but quickly realized there was a whole world of cinema to discover. The thing about filmmaking that I love so much is its shared medium. You come into a dark theatre with strangers and have this group experience. Even if you watch a film alone at home, it’s this idea that you are bound by countless others that have watched the same film as you and you are all connected by this piece of work. Conversely, the making of films is also a uniquely shared artistic expression that requires a lot of manpower and collaboration with other artists to create one cohesive piece. In that way, I find it incredibly fulfilling artistically.

AM: What’s the last film you watched that blew your mind?

AS: I came to discover Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou quite late, but I was really blown away by his film Dust in the Wind. I also liked the Swedish drama film Force Majeure.

AM: What are the must-have components of a great film?

AS: Having something to say and knowing how to say it. A filmmaker must be willing to take risks and put forth some sort of vision and filmmaking approach to what they are making. It may turn out, it may not, but that’s the risk you have to take to make something great. Otherwise, it will always be mediocre, harmless, and forgettable at best.

AM: How do you choose scripts in general?

AS: Usually the script or story idea I’m working on will have to force its way into my brain before I take it seriously. Even if a script idea is good, I usually do everything I can to convince myself it’s not good enough or not right for me. However, if it stays lodged in my brain and I keep thinking about it, then I usually start to heed its call.

AM: In Her Place is in Korean with English subtitle. Did you write the script in Korean or English? Did you set the story in Korea to highlight the stigma of infertility and adoption in that country or could the story have taken place in rural Ontario, for example?

"In Her Place"

AS: The original script was written in English and slowly translated into Korean. However, even with multiple translations, the Korean script was not quite where the English script was, but we used it as a starting point and worked with the actors to flesh things out more naturalistically. I set the story in Korea because I have a personal connection to the country. Also, the story dealt with a real cultural issue in that country. However, it’s not exclusive to Korea as there are many countries and cultures that have this stigma with infertility and adoption. So I was hoping it was a universal story that would reach people everywhere, including at home in Canada, even if it wouldn’t have made any sense to set it here.

AM: How did you come up with the idea, and develop it, for the film?

AS: The genesis of this film came when I overheard a large family argument at a restaurant in Korea where I happened to be eating. Half the table was accusing the other half that a member of the family, who was not present at the table, was faking her pregnancy. I found it odd at the time, but then thought back to when people in my own family would gossip about so-and-so not being the “real” child of so-and-so. At the time, I was pondering story ideas for a farm location in Korea I wanted to set my next film in. When I left the restaurant, those two elements came together and I realized I had something to build on and explore. I started writing and slowly developing the script, which took a couple of years.

AM: All three actresses in the film are nominated for the Canadian Screen Awards, one of them is practically unknown (Ahn Ji-Hye, who plays the pregnant teen). How did you go about casting for this film?

AS: Casting was one of the more difficult challenges of making this film. Because I didn’t know anybody in Korea, I had to start from ground zero and really knock on a lot of doors. The Korean film system is a very closed community. Everybody is usually cast through personal relationships and sort of a six-degrees-of-separation process. However, despite a lot of dead ends, we started to make some progress and saw a lot of different actors. For Yoon Da-Kyung (who plays the woman seeking to secretly adopt) and Kil Hae-Yeon (who plays the pregnant teen’s mother), I’m really grateful these very experienced actresses put their trust in an unknown Korean-Canadian director. However, for the role of the pregnant teen, we were having absolutely no luck. We looked at up-and-coming young actresses on the screen, stage, and even tried amateurs, but I could not find the right actor to play this very difficult part. I almost gave up and cancelled the film. Then Ahn Ji-Hye came into an open-casting call and absolutely blew everybody away. She had studied acting in school, been in a few student films and student theatre productions, but had been having no luck getting cast in any professional productions. Once I saw her audition, I knew I had to cast her.

AM: Themes surrounding the different types of relationships, crisscrossing different life stages, are carefully nuanced in this film, especially between the three women. What kind of research did you do to develop the characters with a strong female perspective?

AS: I did a lot of general fieldwork on adoptions in Korean teenage pregnancies and the biological aspects of pregnancy, but I also knew this wasn’t an academic paper, but a film that needed to bring an emotional truth with a story and fully formed characters. This is where I really needed to dig deep and trust myself with the characters and the story I was writing. I also had my co-writer Pearl Ball-Harding, who helped me stay on track and provide some perspective. In the end, the immense connection I had with the characters and the story came from a very deep place. I’m not sure why, but I carried this film with me for almost half a decade and could not let them go. Making this film became a mission I had to complete.

AM: Has your mother seen the film? What does she think of it?

AS: My mother was the first person to see the rough cut and she was very taken by the film. She’s watched my filmmaking career with motherly love, curiosity, and trepidation all these years as I made one strange austere film after another. But this was a film that she could emotionally connect with and fully understand – Korean is my mother’s first language – so it was very special.