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| Streaming service Purplay's CEO Cho Il-ji speaks during a recent interview at The Korea Times office in Seoul. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
Streaming service CEO hopes women-directed movies educate audiences about gender equality
By Park Han-sol
In 2018, six out of every 10 university freshmen majoring in theater and film nationwide were women, according to a report by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC)'s Center for Gender Equality in Korean Cinema. Despite women's growing representation in the motion picture industry, commercial films produced and directed by female filmmakers that were screened from 2014 to 2018 account for only 7.9 percent.
Seeing such startling discrepancy between the number of women wishing to pursue a career in film and of those who successfully make their directorial debuts, one can only wonder what has happened to the hundreds of female-led works that remain off the public's radar after their brief appearances within the festival circuit.
The same question has gripped Cho Il-ji's mind since the late 2000s when she tried to recommend films she enjoyed watching at Seoul International Women's Film Festival (SIWFF) to her friend, only to find out they were nowhere to be found after the event wrapped up. And in 2014, her position as the secretary-general at the Korea Queer Film Festival further allowed her to witness in person the sheer number of films the public has been missing out on all these years.
Just five years later, her thirst for such cinematic content led to the birth of Korea's first and only OTT (over-the-top) service and social enterprise dedicated to presenting women's cinema ― Purplay.
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| Purplay's official logo / Courtesy of Purplay |
Under this definition, its streaming content includes the early works of leading female auteurs ― Lim Soon-rye, Lee Kyoung-mi and Kim Bo-ra ― as well as Kangyu Ga-ram's "Candle Wave Feminists," which chronicles the journey of women's rights activists stemming from protests at Seoul's Gangnam Station in 2016 ― close to the scene of an infamous hate crime that triggered public debate on misogyny in Korea.
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| Lim Soon-rye's 'Walking in the Rain' (1994) is one of many women-centric films available on Purplay. Courtesy of Purplay |
"Since we found that it is of foremost importance to help the achievements of women filmmakers become visible in Korean society, most of the contents available on our platform, as of now, are women-directed films," Cho, CEO of Purplay, told The Korea Times in a recent interview.
"But we are also in the process of expanding our spectrum to include other motion pictures centering on gender equality and diversity across different nationalities, races and gender identities."
From features to super-short films, its selection comes from the lineup of renowned film festivals as well as works recommended by women directors themselves and even its own users. But not every recommendation makes the cut as each movie is evaluated against nearly 20 criteria ― including the Bechdel test (a measure of onscreen female representation), F-rating (a grade given to films directed and/or written by women) and LGBTQ+ representation ― to be selected.
Cho said she wanted the 20,000 users of the streaming platform to feel what she had experienced when she went to the women's film festival for the first time.
"Watching the film inside the venue, I didn't come across any part of the narrative that I would find uncomfortable for its unnecessarily provocative or sensational depiction. And when the characters made critical remarks toward gender discrimination, they seemed to resonate with everyone there, sometimes even leading to a round of applause. I was enthralled by this new sensation, something that I couldn't experience before in a typical theater."
Purplay also aims to serve as a financial driving force for women creators to help them in their subsequent projects. Instead of adopting a monthly subscription service like Netflix, the platform allows users to pay a small fee for each film they wish to watch. From 60 to 70 percent of the profit made for each work is then returned to creators.
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| Jeong Da-hee's 'The Armpit Hair Girl' (2017) is one of many women-centric films available on Purplay. Courtesy of Purplay |
The main mission of Cho's company is to promote gender equality through cinema that goes beyond the realm of simple entertainment.
"When we watch movies, we are, of course, aware that it depicts a fictional world. But if we continue to see onscreen characters conforming to typical gender stereotypes ― women only appearing as a victim and mother or men compelled to display hyper-masculine behavior ― our imagination becomes limited and starts affecting us in real life," Cho explained.
As a result, Purplay has carried out a wide range of film-related projects in addition to streaming content to help people expand their imagination in regards to gender roles and representations.
These include an online magazine called "Purzoom" and a monthly movie screening event called "Purple Day," which become windows of communication between women directors and their audience, and the development of a gender-sensitive educational guidebook for elementary and middle school students that incorporates women's cinema into its discussion.
As part of its effort to increase membership, Purplay plans to bring in more works from overseas creators in the near future. It will also try to help more domestic female-centered films to reach users outside of Korea through active subtitle translation. As of now, nearly 70 works in the platform can already be streamed with English subtitles.
In recent years, Korea has started seeing a noticeable progress in women's cinema as 21.5 percent of films released last year were directed by women, while 42.1 percent featured female leads, according to KOFIC. But such unusual figures may be attributed to the sweeping changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a number of commercial films with high production costs to push back their release dates, making way for relatively low-budget indie women-directed films.
And to Cho, it is still too early to determine the position of women's cinema within the industry based on these statistics alone.
"In the 100 years of Korean cinematic history, the growing interest, demand and production of women-led films have not been a thing for such a long time. They would have to be in place for the next 10, 20 years at least to make a difference," she said.
"When the amount of content that we now categorize as 'women's cinema' grows significantly and becomes a staple in the industry, that will be the day when we can stop differentiating them from the rest and start calling them for what they are ― just 'films.'"
