If you know films, you know Gloria Kim. Take a deep breath for this one: Born in Seoul, Korea, writer/director Gloria Ui Young Kim comes from a long line of media makers. She’s an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Director’s Lab, TIFF Talent Lab, NSI and WIDC. She recently directed, wrote and produced her first feature, award-winning ‘Queen of the Morning Calm’ (Women in the Director’s Chair Feature Film Award, Greenberg Fund, Telefilm), which premiered at the 2019 Whistler Film Festival. The film’s script placed in the 2nd round at the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and earned Gloria both the Spotlight on Screenwriters and Telefilm Canada New Voices Award. Her last short ‘Flamenco’ (CBC, 2015) won the 2017 Corus Fearless Female Filmmaker Award. Her other short films have won numerous awards and played at festivals all over the world.

She was recently nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction for ‘Left For Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story’ (Lifetime). Her first CSA nomination was for Best Director for ‘It’s My Party’ (TVO). She was chosen by Women in View as one of the 2017 Five in Focus, and was on the Board of Directors for Women in Film and Television-Toronto. She’s worked as a writer for Breakthrough Entertainment’s ‘Blood and Water’ and ‘Captain Fang’ for OMNI. Her shorts for CBC have won multiple awards and festivaled around the world. Her next feature, ‘The Banquet’ (Hawkeye Pictures), recently received the CFC/Netflix Accelerator. She and creator Samora Smallwood have also received development funding for their thriller series, ‘Gone’, from the Canada Council/CBC Creation Accelerator.  Gloria was recently part of the BIPOC Showrunner Bootcamp and is in the Netflix-Banff Diversity of Voices Initiative. 

Armin Sethi sat down with Gloria, who discussed her creative process and the development of her film ‘The Banquet’, which explores themes of food, culture, and mother-daughter relationships. She started her conversation by sharing her journey from writing her first story at age eight to becoming a filmmaker, emphasizing the importance of authentic storytelling rooted in personal experience. Gloria explained how she maintains cultural accuracy in her work, even when facing pressure to cater to broader audiences. The conversation touched on the challenges of representing minority perspectives in mainstream media and the pressures of balancing artistic integrity with commercial success. 

Behind the Scenes Still from ‘The Banquet’

The Moment: I Want To Be a Storyteller

I think they’re two separate moments. I’ve always been a storyteller, right? I think some of us are like that. I think when you’re an artist, you’re just an artist. Artists got art, right? You know, I always staged plays, and I would improvise, and I always made my cousins do plays with me, and then I would make friends at school, at recess, do plays. I remember writing my first story in grade 2. I was 8 years old, and the teacher wanted us to write an Indigenous story, and I just remember so distinctly feeling like I was channeling, right? Something was coming through me. And I remember, she read the story, and then she came up to me and said, “Gloria, did you read this story somewhere?” I said no. She was a bit flabbergasted. Because it was me, but it was not me, right? I think every writer will say this, like, every person who is working in storytelling will say that there is something that’s happening that is just free-flowing. To me, it’s spiritual. Not everybody will interpret it that way, but for me, the framework that I choose, it feels very spiritual. I’m channeling. I just remember thinking, like, yeah, this is what I’m here to do.

The Foundation: The Starting Point of Storytelling

Notwithstanding family pressure, being an immigrant, and being part of the Asian diaspora, and needing to be a professional, and all of those kinds of professional professions that we’re supposed to be plotted into, right. Which, in my family’s case, they were like, “you’re going to be a lawyer”. I was like, “uh, okay”. 

I did my degree in English literature at U of T, and I had writer’s block. I was in my 20s; I was having kind of an identity crisis. I didn’t want to do the things that my parents wanted me to do. I didn’t know how to make a life of my own. I didn’t know what direction to go.  I just randomly saw a filmmaking course at Ryerson, and I thought, you know, I should take this. My family background – my grandfather and my uncles were all in the film industry. They were producers and screenwriters, and one of them had his own TV show and was a TV host.

This was not something I learned until I was 16, when I met my cousins on my mother’s side. They were like, basically, you have to love films; it’s in your blood. So I just thought, I’ll just take this course. I remember picking up the camera and just feeling like something had downloaded in me, this kind of knowledge. 

Lived Experiences: The Emotional Truth in Storytelling

I think I always wanted to tell stories that came from my experience. For me, you have to tell stories of what you know. We can have so much empathy, and I think as a storyteller, you want to sit in the place of the subject, and be the subject, and live the subject and speak for the subject. But if you are not in the place of the subject, it’s really hard, right? It’s really, really challenging.

I always think about stories where, for example, white men are telling stories about women of color, or a woman is a sex worker, and they always appear to come from this very objectifying place, right? I don’t think it’s because they lack empathy or compassion. I think it’s because they just don’t actually really know what it’s like to be a human in that position, and they don’t have the lived experience of that character. That’s why, to me, integrity in storytelling is really important. If the emotional truth of it isn’t there, then I don’t necessarily want to tell that story in that same way. That is different from directing something that someone else has written. Someone else has written this story, and then you as a director work with the writer and help channel that point of view. It’s already set out and laid out. 

Recognizing the Outside Voice Early: Channeling Integrity in Storytelling

When I was writing short stories, I always wanted to write about my own experience, so I think it is important in terms of integrity and where we are right now in this time. We need to be the ones to tell our stories.

When I did my degree in English literature, I took a Canadian literature course, and we were focusing on Margaret Lawrence. She’s a wonderful writer, and spent some time in Africa. She had a book of short stories where she spoke as if she were an African character. I remember saying something in class, and the teacher got upset with me because, you know, this is a sacred subject for him. And I just said, “Listen, even if you look at these stories, like, Margaret Lawrence has chosen to write in English, but she’s written in pigeon English. Like, to come from the voice of these characters and, and when you are someone who’s speaking in this language – she’s trying to channel this character, but this is still an other for her, right?” She doesn’t have that lived experience, and so she’s already objectifying these characters in a way that is not true to who they actually are, right? It’s the outsider’s point of view of this culture, and I’m not saying we can’t read this work, but that we really need to see it through this lens, and then he just ignored me.

Behind the Scenes Still from: ‘Gangnam Project’

External Pressures: How to Remain Authentic to Your Lens

I remember when I was writing my script for Queen of the Morning Calm, which is a story about a Korean sex worker and her daughter, escaping cycles of poverty and abuse and neglect; it was also, to me, a love story, right? A love story between the mother and the daughter. At that time, I got a lot of pushback from non-Asian readers who said, “[w]hy is the mother so mean to her daughter? I was like, “Oh, you think she’s mean? Okay, well, I’ll be flexible, I’ll try to rewrite this, I’ll try to make her more kind and nice, and so I changed her tone.” I remember I had a Chinese producer, Sidney Chu, but I had him read it. And he goes, “yeah, uh, like, what is up with this mom? Why is she acting so nice to her kid? I don’t know any Asian mom who acts like this.” I thought, “[h]e’s right! Like, I had changed this character to suit feedback from people who didn’t really understand why the character is written the way it was. I shouldn’t have changed her like that; it was ridiculous. Asian moms, they’re just a certain way – it is a cultural thing, right? Asian mothers and their daughters, there’s a very different dynamic than Asian mothers and their sons – we are just valued differently. I  mean, it is more obvious here, but around the planet, there is a conscious bias towards men.

To bring it back, it was important for him to bring me back to the fact that I have to stay true to myself and my voice and what my lived experience is. Otherwise, I’m going to alienate my core audience. And then, I’m not staying true to my intentions. So that’s a very real example of me facing those pressures where multiple readers were asking me why she was such a bad mother…and maybe she was a bad mother, but I’m not interested in writing stories about perfect people. Like, I want to write stories about people who are flawed. Many things can be true at once, so we need to embrace that in our characters too. 

Behind the Scenes Still from ‘The Banquet’

‘The Banquet’: Telling a Story about Love and Food

I came up with the idea in 2008, and this was when I was at the CFC Director’s Lab. I always wanted to tell a story about food because I am obsessed with food. I am just always thinking about it. But I also wanted to tell these mother-daughter stories, healing mother-daughter stories, because in my family system – I just think culturally, like, girls aren’t valued in my culture and in my family system on both sides; girls were not seen as being important or as cherished.

For me, I have a daughter, and for me, the healing has been having her and cherishing her and telling her she’s the most important, which I tell her every day. She’s 16. She’s amazing. She’s a singer-songwriter, and she knows I think she is incredible. 

So, I just really wanted to tell a healing story about such relationships and do it through the context of food, because food was the one thing in my family that was an expression of love. It’s like love, love the way that it’s seen in Western culture is not expressed in the same way in Eastern culture, and for us, love isn’t in the touching, hugging, or cuddling, or any of that stuff, right? Like, the stuff that you kind of see as normal, right? For us, it was food. My mother loved food, and she was an amazing cook. I learned how to cook by watching her and just being around her and smelling the food. And food was always a big deal, right? We were part of the church; my grandpa was the pastor, and every Sunday we would gather, and we would eat. I wanted to talk about that and celebrate it, but also talk about the pressure of it.

For me, I grew up on Korean food, so when I think of comfort food, that’s what I think of – like a kimchi stew. I just wanted to bring that to the screen because I just thought, I’m obsessed with it. And I want to tell a healing story through food. Food is love, and it came from a personal space, so like we’ve been talking about, it fit who I was as a storyteller.

Behind the Scenes Still from ‘The Banquet’