Seoul: M-Line Distribution [distributor], 2021. 1 online resource (90 min.). In Korean with English subtitles.
The camera follows More walking along a busy street in Itaewon, a historic neighbourhood in Seoul well-known for its nightlife, particularly its gay bars, nightclubs, and transgender bars. More, the protagonist of the documentary film I Am More (2021), is in full drag queen makeup and attire, wearing high heels and fishnet stockings. The camera enters a well-known drag queen club called Trans, located in an area known as “homo hill.” A signboard featuring drag queens is fixed on the wall above the entrance door, decorated with light bulbs. Going through the red door, the camera pans across the club where there are a couple of drag queens and customers. The film cuts to More at the centre of the stage, lip-syncing to a song that we cannot hear. The film mixes various scenes of More performing, giving us a powerful introduction to the artist. As the camera moves in for a close-up of More’s face while she’s backstage, she remarks: “Tip big, wenches.”
I Am More is directed by Lee Ilha, a Korea-born Japan-based documentary filmmaker. Following three documentary films about Koreans living in Japan as a racial minority, Lee explores the ways in which sexual minorities are positioned in the South Korean cultural and political landscape through More’s unconventional aesthetic practices. Lee diligently follows the documentarian path, constructing More’s life narrative as Mo Jimin. In the film, More vividly describes homophobic and transphobic encounters she experienced in her youth, her mandatory military service, and during her dance studies at the Korean National University of Arts. She ended up not pursuing a career in ballet and instead found a home in Itaewon, where she has been staging commercial drag queen shows for the last two decades. On the surface, this narrative, while being easily accessible to audiences who aren’t necessarily familiar with queer and trans experiences, runs the risk of being yet another documentary promoting the spectacle of queer suffering. But More is more than that. With her carefully crafted performances, More transforms the film into spectacles of queer and trans survival.
The film serves as a new kind of stage for More, both as a drag artist and as a contemporary choreographer and dancer. Director Lee and More stage scenes to invite us to fully explore her unique aesthetics. Although she makes a living on tips from shows in Itaewon, More does not employ humour, smiles, or other accommodating demeanors typically found in a drag queen’s repertoire that are meant to please audiences. Instead, More captivates her audience with her mastery of ballet, her skinny but muscular dancer’s body, and her extreme expressions of fear, hurt, sadness, and rage. In the scenes staged for the documentary, this artistic tendency is even more amplified: More opens her eyes as big as possible, never blinks, and never smiles or laughs. The film also brings More’s performances outside of the Itaewon clubs and creates new stages across public and private spaces, including a beach, a queer parade, a bridge, a market, a rooftop, a Korean traditional pavilion, a park, Gwanghwamun Square, a Buddhist temple, and her parents’ home and neighbourhood in the countryside. With the excuse that they’re shooting a film, More and the director provocatively stage scenes that serve to interrupt heteronormative culture and society.
The documentary effectively portrays More’s interruptive aesthetics. In particular, there are scenes in which More dances in front of hate groups at Gwanghwamun Square and on the lawn at Seoul Plaza in front of Seoul City Hall during the Seoul Queer Culture Festival. The soundtrack ironically plays the song “Ah! Korea,” which came out during former president Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship to promote patriotism, juxtaposing More’s beauty with the desperate attempts by right-wing Evangelical Christian hate groups to oppress queer and trans activism. At Gwanghwamun Square, More is dressed in pink as a cheerleader, wearing a swimsuit, high heels and fishnet stockings, and holding a pair of pom-poms. What does More cheer for? Certainly not the future of a nation envisioned by the hate groups that erase homosexuals, transgenders, refugees, and Muslims. Her fabulous dance contrasts with the right-wing crowds holding the South Korean flag while chanting homophobic slurs. In front of Seoul City Hall, More is dressed as a goddess, her body wrapped with white fabric holding a pair of fans made of large feathers as she dons a crown of thorns decorated with the same kind of white feathers as her fans. More stands still in front of the dancing Christians who are holding an ugly-looking banner that says in English, “Homosexuality is a Sin! Return to Jesus!” Here, More quietly but fabulously stages a counterprotest with her divine presence. The body politics More uses in these scenes gesture toward a new futurity, positioning herself as a figure to follow.
More’s journey in the film, moving across the metropolitan city of Seoul, a farming town in Jeolla province, and New York City, ends at the club Trans, where her history as More began. I Am More is set to meet even wider audiences through CJ CGV, the largest multiplex cinema chain in South Korea in summer 2022. What path awaits More? This moment of the 2020s has seen a large number of queer and trans Korean artists gain mainstream attention and I am curious to see where this film will take More. It demonstrates the challenges that queer and trans Korean artists face; at the same time, with its poetic and provocative cinematography that was achieved through a collaboration between the director and More, the film invites us to immerse ourselves in the world of More and asks us to be part of her new future.
* While English subtitles refer to More as “he” in the film, More confirmed with the review author that she prefers she/her/hers pronouns (Yeong Ran Kim, personal communication, May 27, 2022).
Yeong Ran Kim
Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville