Definitely a treat of completists, “Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club” starts by mentioning Bong Joon-ho's previously unknown first film, a stop-motion animated short titled “Looking for Paradise” that he made in his home basement in 1992, before it dwells in the history of the particular club, which, apart from Bong, also had Choi Jong-tae (“Hand in Hand”, “Fly, Daddy, Fly” among its members.
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In a style that looks like a zoom meeting/reunion of old friends, the members of the club, which also include, apart from the aforementioned, Lim Hoon-a, Choi Jong-tae, Lee Dong-hoon, Ban Se-bum and others, narrate the way the particular club started, expanded, and eventually became a platform for screening Bong's first film. Through this overall light approach, apart from the very beginning of the Oscar-winning director in cinema, the viewers also get to know about South Korea in the early 90s, and particularly the rise of film clubs, which were popping in university campuses all around the country.
The impact the clubs had on the boom in cinema that took place during the late 90s/beginning of 00s is also mentioned, while Lee Hyuk-rae also focuses on how “Yellow Door” functioned, with the copying of classic movies on video, mostly from Europe and the US, their studying scene by scene, and the (faulty) translation of English books about cinema, being among the most interesting and entertaining aspects of the narrative.
Bong Joon-ho emerges as the protagonist, with him having the most screening time, while the occasionally contradictory testaments about the past, by the people participating in the documentary, induce the film with the “Rashomon” effect, as Bong himself mentions at some point. The changing of offices, the actual yellow door, the upscaling of the club, and Bong's proceedings during his time there take a large part of the documentary. Lastly, the current lives of the people talking induces the whole thing with a sense of drama and nostalgia, since very few of them continued dealing with cinema later on.
Lee Hyuk-rae follows the ‘talking heads' approach for the most part, but both the overall climate among the members, and the presence of the two directors prevents the documentary from becoming dull, at least for the most part. Furthermore, the inclusion of video, photographs and the presentation of the areas the club was situated as it is now add an appealing sense of movement to the film, with the editing in that regard working nicely.
At the same time, however, the approach of the documentary to the cinematic history presented is rather epidermic, with “Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club” emerging more as something exclusively addressed to Bong's completists, with the duration of 84 minutes emerging as excessive. The fact that the info (as much as its analysis) presented here is limited is quite obvious, with the lack of subtitling the names of the people who appear on the film becomes rather annoying after a fashion.
