The Cinema Guild folks have picked up the prestigious 2011 winner of the IDFA’s Best Feature-Length Documentary Award. A portrait that will likely leave makes waves on the upcoming festival circuit (not unlike the IDFA’s previous winners in Last Train Home, Burma VJ, Stranded) Seung-jun Yi’s “Planet of Snail” will receive several local U.S festival showings (e.g. Hot Docs, Silverdocs) this Spring and Summer before receiving its theatrical run.
Gist: Young-Chan has been deaf and blind since childhood. As he puts it himself, “In the beginning there was darkness and silence, and the darkness and silence were with god. And when ‘I’ arrived, they came to me.” Young-Chan has no idea how to participate in the world until he meets Soon-Ho, who also has a physical handicap. He marries her and learns to communicate with the outside world through her.
Worth Noting: Documentarian Seung-jun Yi directed 2008’s “Children of God”.
Do We Care?: The IDFA’s Best Feature-Length Documentary Award is a gold stamp seal of approval — put this on our must see doc items for the upcoming North American spring doc fests.
