„Koreans hate sweat and physical contact and after a meal they get up right away.“
This was the first informationen we got from our chaperon Florian about the inhabitants of South Korea.
A 16-hours-flight was lying ahead and a wild mix of emotions was inside of us: excitement, happiness, curiosity and a certain fear of the unknown.
It was a long journey - and we were so impatient.


The Berlinale gave us the opportunity of aneight-day-trip to South Korea, to join an international film workshop at the „Seoul International Youth Film Festival“.

When we left the airport, we felt the different climate at once. It was about 32 degrees Centigrade and the humidity of 70% seemed to squeeze all the breath out of us.

In a modern youth hostel we met 15 non-Korean workshop-colleagues from France, Italy, Tunesia, America and, with us, Germany.

And the next day we met the Korean workshop-members in a cinema close to our hostel. We hadn't expected the size of the group. Surrounded by about 70 chatting small Koreans, all dressed in the light green festival-T-shirts we felt a little insecure.
It was a unique view and a very strange situation, a picture that will stay in our memory.

Finally we were divided into ten groups, the Europeans were split up and got into a group with five or six Koreans. The first attempts to communicate turned out to be quite difficult, almost impossible. Only a few of them spoke English or dared to try. We could only try harder and see what the work would bring.

The opening ceremony to the festival was long and unfortunately in Korean. We tried to look interested and to be patiant.

And then everything went very quick, a few hours later we were on a bus to Namyangju, were the KOFIC Studio Complex is located and where we would spend the next five days.
The same evening we started our film work.

Each group had the task to produce a film about "violence prevention", starting with the script, over storybord and shooting to the final cut. In between we got units in film theory. The schedule was very hard, we started at half past eight in the morning and worked until 11 pm.

The work was very long-wound, between us was not only a language-problem, we had also very contrary ideas of how a film should be told and were grown up in completely different (film) cultures.
This was an interesteing, sometimes very difficult exchange, but we all had great fun.

Five days passed very quickly, the last evening the final cutting went on till night. The next morning we went back to Seoul.

Before the closing ceremony, in a small cinema our films were presented to the workshop members and our chaperons. It was really fascinating how differently each group had solved the topic, so that ten really unique films were created.

After the festival we had still some time in Seoul.
We spent our last day on trying strange food, cruising the city, from clothing- street to electricity-street and to jewellery- and furniture-alley, discovering the Berlin Square with a piece of our Berlin wall, eating 33cm-long ice cream flavoured with green tea.

Seoul is flashing, lucid, exciting.
The Koreans - so different and still so alike.
This journey was a unique experience for us.