In Johnny Ma’s wily “The Mother and the Bear,” it’s gradually revealed to be a bit of a blessing in disguise for Sara (Kim Ho-jung) to learn that her daughter Sumi (Leere Park) slipped into a coma. Of course distraught at first to hear that her only child took a spill on the ice in Winnipeg where she decided to move a few years earlier to teach elementary school, the prognosis is hopeful enough for the concerned mom from South Korea to see her daughter’s unexpected rest as an opportunity to amend the parts of her life she hasn’t exactly approved of, namely her disinterest in getting married or even getting in a serious relationship with a significant other.
It’s a premise that’s ripe for laughs when Sumi is bound to be surprised by what’s in store once she wakes up, but Ma has fun more formally as well after directing a pair of scrappy Chinese-set dramas (“Old Stone” and “To Live to Sing”) when he’s interested in the epiphanies Sara has as she comes to find out more about the young woman her daughter has become a continent away and how a desire to shape her life has supplanted any search for personal satisfaction of her own. Amidst a slightly surreal winter in Canada where the cinematography seems touched by the Northern Lights, Sara cooks up a chimera of her own with a misguided scheme to find a suitor for Sumi by starting to impersonate her online, but she inevitably is brought back to reality when a visit to the one restaurant in Winnipeg that serves kimchi leads her to meet Sam (Lee Won-jae), the proprietor that may end up as a love connection for herself.
Whereas most films get romantic the more fantastical they become, “The Mother and the Bear” finds the opposite is true as Sara loses her illusions about what her daughter should be and finds accepting what’s right in front of her may end up being even better than what she could imagine and as chilly as it gets in Winnipeg, the film is bound to melt hearts. After premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 2024 and playing to audiences around the world during a celebrated festival run, “The Mother and the Bear” is now arriving Stateside and Ma spoke about the melting pot that led to his latest film, taking on the flavors of so many different cultures and working with the film’s star Kim on such a strong lead turn.
How did this come about?
I made several independent Chinese movies and at some point, I saw that I was not getting closer to meeting the audience, not because of the films that I was making, but because there’s a system in place in China that really dictates who gets to watch what. So I felt that if I’m not getting closer to meeting the audience, then maybe this is the end for me and I was looking for a new beginning in North America. A lot of my friends were like, “Hey, you should come here because you started off your career here,” and I actually left North America because I felt that my stories were not going to have the time of the day. I didn’t want to be a minority in life, but also in my career as well and they wanted me to write stories for Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it was just not what I had in mind for myself.
So I came over and you do the Hollywood watercooler tour [where] I met a Chilean company that seemed to have the same sensibilities as me. We were both outsiders to the North American system and we had the same ideals, so we started working [together] and then little by little, all this came around. What you see in front of you is a Korean fairy tale, romantic comedy, telenovela made by a Chinese Canadian filmmaker in a Canadian Chilean co-production is a very weird thing, but the story behind the film is its own story too.
What was it like setting the story in a culture that wasn’t necessarily your own?
It’s really interesting. Throughout the whole thing, no one asked me to try to make this into a Chinese film, which I think it’s a indication of the system that we’re in. It’s not because they like the Korean culture more, but because Korean culture was hot at that moment and as an Asian filmmaker who looks enough like a Korean that if I had a Korean idea for a Korean story, who is to stop it? That’s why it got made.
But I had a responsibility and also the honor of being able to depict a culture and I’m talking about not only the Korean culture, but the Winnipeg culture as well. Winnipeg doesn’t get put on screen ever — people will go to Winnipeg to shoot so that it looks like another city — so to be able to do that, I took it on as an honor. Winnipeg hosts some of the world’s most unique artists. They’re a very special breed and as a filmmaker from the outside who gets to make a film about their city and actually put their city on the screen with a decent budget is a very rare thing.
They could have rejected me, but they embraced me because I think that they were understanding that we get one shot at this. I’m going to show all of Winnipeg, and as I’m there, I felt that it was my rite of passage not just to go there early [before the production] to really know this city, and also to live through a winter there. I was living in an apartment of another fellow filmmaker’s father who had passed away, so all of it was very strange and surreal. Winnipeg is a city where if you go outside in the wintertime, you’d better have a plan because if you’re walking outside longer than 30 minutes, it can get actually dangerous. You better have a place where you can go and be warm because it’s the frontier between [civilization] and to the unknown.
But I would describe it like a metaphor — you have a system that is the North American Hollywood-esque system that is a strong current like a river and when you step into that water, you can fight this current or you can flow with the current. You also have to understand your boundaries, and my boundary was culture. It was also about depicting a 55-year-old Asian woman on the screen who is essentially having her own coming of age. That’s a very sensitive thing that I have to be very understanding of [because] I don’t have that experience. I have my mother and I have the actress who doesn’t have children [of her own], but she’s an artist and we can play act, but we have to do the work.
How did you find Kim Ho-jung for this?
It’s really crazy because finding her was the hardest thing. For a story like this, if you get the cast right, the movie’s there. You just turn on the camera and you let the artist work and Kim Ho-Jung is the purest of artists, meaning there’s a great amount of very beautiful, great artists that are very well known and they’re very busy, but there’s another layer of artists who are masters in their craft and they don’t have the opportunities like the big names do. If you’re an Asian filmmaker and you come to New York or LA rather than going after the names that you know, you talk to the artists, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I know who you should talk to. That’s the best kept secret.” That’s who Kim Ho-Jung is in the Korean cinema culture.
There weren’t a lot of Korean films that I could see that had her work, but there was one where she played this very difficult character of a cancer patient who was getting closer to the end every day and she wanted to experience life again. There was a scene I remember [where] essentially she has intercourse for the very last time as a cancer patient, and [I thought], if an actress is able to have the courage to go there, she can go anywhere. The fact that we were able to find her was a gift to myself, but also for the film and when I say anywhere, [I also mean spending] two months in a country that she doesn’t know of, working with people that she doesn’t know, in minus 40 degree weather. And she was playing this almost like she was closer to a silent film character, so what she was doing is pure artistry. I can’t say enough about her performance because it’s just pure magic.
The score has a really magical quality to it, blending cultural influences as well. What was it like putting music on this?
Yeah, I was very, very lucky to work with Marie-Hélène L. Delorme. I would say she is a best kept secret [too], but hopefully not for long. I had a connection with Mike White, the creator of “The White Lotus,” who was a mentor of mine years and years ago when I was at Sundance and Cristobal [Tapia de Veer], the composer is Chilean and Canadian, which was the [same as the] co-producers of this movie. Because how crazy that fit is, I asked [Mike] if he could make an introduction to Cristobal, who at the time was the hottest composer in the world, and he said, “Look, I really love the idea, but I’m so busy right now. I would tell you I have two favorite composers. One is Mica LevI and the other one is Marie-Hélène L. Delorme from Montreal.” She was like an apprentice to him and he introduced me to her and it was the greatest joy to work with a composer of such a massive talent. She was the songbird of our film in some way.
When you called it a fairy tale before, the film has notes of that both in the story and this slightly heightened visual expression with the colorful lighting, but it’s also quite grounded. What was it like striking the right balance?
The producers of the system wanted a romantic comedy, and I said, “I don’t really want [to do that], but ’90s Meg Ryan movies were my guilty pleasures,” so [I thought] “Let’s watch some of those,” but the fact that the character is Korean [made me think] let’s look at some Korean soap operas. Then the fact that I was working with Chileans, and I did the post-production in Chile, I started looking into telenovelas. They were all melodramas in some way. And when you look at the oldest melodrama, it’s essentially a fairy tale. A melodrama allows people to go through a journey a fear gently. It’s for kids and for families and the oldest melodramas are the stories where parents tell their little girl or little boy about a beast, either a wolf or a bear. Every single culture has these stories. In North America, it’s the Red Riding Hood. In China, it’s Grandma Wolf. In indigenous culture, it’s about a bear. So I was telling a story that parents would tell their kids to say, “Hey, it’s a dangerous world out there in nature. Don’t go too far from us.” How do we pay homage to a fairy tale and do it in the way that my collaborators and I all together were interested in? We created our own genre in some way and in this film, I think that when you come out of it, you think “Well, this is not a Korean film, and this is not really a Canadian film. What the hell is this? Who is the guy who made this?” That’s the kind of question that I want the audience to leave the film with because I like making cinema that makes people think, and whatever way you make people think these days is an interesting thing.
“The Mother and the Bear” opens on January 2nd in New York at the IFC Center and January 9th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Glendale.