Lee Soojung's short non-fiction movie “News Feed On My…” is one of twelve short anti-war movies from the first part of the campaign “Against The War, In The Name Of Cinema” started by the New Asian Filmmakers Collective. As such, the campaign is a great example of film activism.
News Feed On My… is streaming on
CathayPlay
The short is comprised of close shots of the director's Facebook newsfeed opened on her phone and her finger swiping through the constant ballast of news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the background, we see a newspaper, never read or even touched.
In its brief runtime of only six minutes, Soojung's movie manages to touch upon many things that became apparent in the first days after the Russian army invaded Ukraine. One of them is the sad fact that up until that point, the country was largely unknown, especially in the director's homeland of South Korea. This becomes most apparent through two very brief and cleverly added references to Odessa, the place of possibly the most famous sequence of “Battleship Potemkin”, and the Italian movie “Sunflower”, parts of which were shot in Ukraine when the country was still part of the USSR. As Lee herself says in her director's statement, she didn't know that either of the two films are connected with the country, she thought of them as Russian. So, only when the war erupted could she, and many more people, we might assume, find out that many things they used to think of as Russian are actually not.
The second thing Lee's simple, but effective, non-fiction short points our attention to is the way most people consume news. Though the traditional media is still existent, after all a newspaper is present in most of the four short scenes shot in four consecutive days, the majority of people decide to learn about what happens in the world through social media, mostly from the pages of people they like, trust, or who are simply their friends. In her case, we see her read and like the post of a very small cluster of people, in a way allowing them to form her understanding of the invasion and what is happening almost at the other end of the world from the room in Korea she is confined in, due to COVID-19. There is something very vulnerable and honest in this complete openness on Lee's side in front of the viewer.
“News Feed On My…” ends with still shots from an anti-war protest in Korea. It is held possibly at the time when Lee Soojung was shut in her room, scrolling through her phone to see the news. This inability to participate in the anti-war effort, something that many people in similar or worse situations than hers must feel, gives a very elegiac ending to the short.
