


Love Before Bond
Love before Bond is a fairy tale about people who have never met. Through his own experience with displacement, Kim tackles identity or cultural otherness by using explicit references to African-American literature, notably of James Baldwin; and to William Shakespeare or Franz Schubert.
The film stemmed from Kim’s interest in his millennial niece’s adolescent angst. ‘As a Korean-American female, my niece tries to find herself in an existing narrative of the marginalized. This, presently in the USA, is the narrative of people of colour, which, for a teenager, is as alien as anything else—so it is for a young man of colour.’ The columns in the film are a rendition of the Pleasure Pavilion (1964) by Philip Johnson, whose aesthetic path offsets Baldwin’s even though they both lived in New York City at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement.