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| Yoon Ji-hye in 'Clean Up' poster. She revealed on social network on Dec. 14 how the filming was mismanaged in so many ways. Naver |
By Ko Dong-hwan
Korean actress Yoon Ji-hye has condemned a movie in which she plays a lead and which hits theaters this week, calling the movie "misery porn."
The star of the drama "Clean Up" said filming "from more than two years ago still bothers me" and explained in a long social network post how the low-budget film that cost 70 million won ($59,000) was a hodgepodge of slovenly management of sites and local passers-by. She felt her safety threatened and embarrassed while acting, according to the post, which was erased after two days exposure on Dec. 14-15.
"I didn't mind about money when I first decided to join this movie," said Yoon in the post regarding the movie, which was directed by Kwon Man-ki. It was a graduate film from the Korean Academy of Film Arts, a school specially created to nurture filming professionals by the state-funded Korean Film Council.
"I wanted to do an arts-focused minimal job and work with fledgling artists from the film industry, hoping to rediscover my passion out of it. Turned out I was wrong."
Having filmed day and night for one month, she said she started to detect something "nonsensical" while into the third shooting.
She said she had to jump out of a running car with no safety measures and was forced to leave a subway station while filming because she was mistaken for a thief. Noises from walkie-talkies and mobile phones disrupted her filming, and passers-by at shooting sites were left uncontrolled.
She said it was "a site without any overseer, provided no field directions or controls, putting actors on a physical and mental edge to perform."
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| The online revelation by Yoon, right, caused Gram Films and her agency C-Jes Entertainment to counter the allegations. Naver |
Yoon, who debuted in the 1998 horror flick hit "Whispering Corridors," also condemned distributer Gram Films when it said on social network that filming took place in a "gleeful atmosphere."
She retorted, "I want rhetorically to ask to whom it was a gleeful atmosphere," and argued that the company "shouldn't act like they own the film and call the movie 'masterpiece' or 'award-winner'." In 2018, the film won the New Currents category at the Busan International Film Festival and the Best Film prize at the third Macau International Film Festival.
The actress, 41, said she had rejected the filmmaker's initial proposal to act without a guarantee and received a "meager" 1 million won that "was no more than a nominal amount that was less than the country's legal minimum wage.
"Without the least preparation of filming settings, the consequences all fell on the acting crews at the fore, turning the filming sites into places of extreme agony due to excessive distress."
Gram Films responded to her online post, saying on Monday it would look into the matter. Yoon's agency C-Jes Entertainment said the same day it would arrange an internal meeting to discuss the rare outburst from an actress whose movie is about to hit national theaters.
"Clean Up" portrays a low-wage building cleaner (played by Yoon) who had once abducted a boy and later re-encounters him as their unfortunate destinies crisscross and take them back to their dark, traumatic past.
