THE STRAITS TIMES (SINGAPORE) | MAY, 1998


SHE HELPS YOU OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS.

RENAISSANCE WOMAN

In her films, New York-based Korean director Iara Lee explores how technology interacts with creativity.

WHEN Iara Lee gets good at one thing, she stops doing it and starts doing something she does not know how to do. "One needs to be ready to start from scratch all the time," she says. "I always start my projects from that point of view. I don't know anything about it and I just totally immerse myself. I surround myself with expert consultants and people who really know the material."

She feels this helps her bring a fresh perspective to what might sound like turgid topics -- the impact of technology on the world, for instance.

"I'm always interested in investigating how technology enhances creativity," she says.

Indeed, it is an approach that has turned the Brazil-born, New York-based 32-year-old Korean into a film director who is opening people's eyes -and ears -to the changing world.

Lee was here over the weekend for the screening of her second full-length feature, Modulations, at the Singapore International Film Festival.

The movie premiered earlier this year at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival in the United States. In it, Lee splashes the screen with a compelling collage of interviews, cutting-edge visuals, studio footage and live performances to explore the world of electronic music. It leads her to the controversial conclusion that the synthesizer -and its computer relatives -have not only enhanced creativity, but have made the world more democratic. This is especially true for the young, who seem to know the ins and outs of bits and bytes and hardware and software, she says. "Just a few years ago, kids had no power. Now, with all this technology, they're the ones who have the power," she smiles.

Modulations is rare among documentaries in that it will be shown commercially at US cinemas. It is a spin-off from her first movie, Synthetic Pleasures. That film wowed audiences at more than 50 movie festivals worldwide, including Singapore's last year. It played in more than 70 cities in the US and received rave reviews in such publications as The New York Times, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle and Paper magazine.

Lee said Synthetic Pleasures started out as a short film about a giant indoor beach in Japan.
"I just thought it was a surreal thing. But then it grew to encompass the whole artificial world -landscapes, beauty, sex, even intelligence," she says. Audiences came out as frightened as they were fascinated. Lee had left them wondering whether reality was obsolete. "What isn't artificial these days?" she asks with a knowing wink, referring to her own chosen career field.

She became interested in making movies after running the film festival in Sao Paola in Brazil, where she lived for five years. It was also one of the many interests of George Gund, a native of Cleveland, Ohio whom she met at the Munich Film Festival in the mid-'80s. A renaissance man to her renaissance woman, he divided his time between San Francisco and New York and the worlds of ice hockey, basketball, Asian and native American art and film.

In 1991, she entered the film programme at New York University, finishing all four years of it in just 2-1/2 years. She also directed and produced three widely-seen short experimental films.

The first, Prufrock -based on a poem by T. S. Eliot -was narrated by a friend, film star Matt Dillon. The second was based on one of Raymond Carver's short stories, Neighbors. The third, Autumn Wind, was shot in the temples of Kyoto against contemporary haiku poems, written and recited by beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

In 1993, Lee and Gund found time to get married. He now produces her movies through a company he named Caipirinha Productions, much to the dismay of their lawyers. "They want us to change it. They can't pronounce it, spell it, don't know what it is," she laughs. Caipirinha, a Brazilian brandy made from very potent sugar-cane, does describe the impact of her films, however. Gund insisted the name be kept.

Like her movies, her interests and technology, Lee finds the company "mutating into different media". "With all this technology nowadays, artists can express themselves in different media like film, music, fashion, technology," she says. Synthetic Pleasures spawned a fashion show with a collection designed by her sister Jussara (like Iara, it is a Brazilian Indian name). She used the finest synthetic material from Switzerland for that. Both movies have also turned Lee into a record producer. She is finishing work on the third and last volume of music from Synthetic Pleasures. She also plans to release a three-volume set of electronic music from Modulations. She has also begun developing the script for her first non-documentary feature film. It will be an adaptation of a 19th-century Brazilian novel, Dom Casmurro, a powerful story of love and betrayal by the celebrated author, Machado de Assis. She plans to update the story and film it in Brazil, but in English with an international cast -probably including Dillon. "It's about the human mind, the craziness of the mind," Lee says and notes that another of her favourite themes will also rear its head again. "What is perception? What is reality?"