Birthday Boy (film)

Birthday Boy is a 2004 short film.

The film is set in Korea, during the war that pitched the north of the country and its allies China and the Soviet Union, against the south and a United Nations coalition led by the United States of America which included more than 17,000 Australian army and air force personnel. But the film is not about the war as such as Sejong makes clear in media interviews, and is certainly not about the Australian experience of this conflict. Neither is it an explicit comment on the conflict in Iraq which began the year before the film was finished. Rather it is about the impact of war on those left behind, and so has a much more universal and timeless appeal.Part of what is exciting about the film from an Australian perspective is that it does not allude to the usual iconography or correspond with the kinds of social and cultural experiences that typically mark films from this country. It does not allude to local histories of storytelling, or overtly suggest that it can tell us something about what it means to be Australian, and yet it tells us so much about these things by telling a story from, about and set in a different place and culture. As SungAe Lee has argued in a reading of the coverage of the film and its success in Korean language newspapers in Sydney, the film provided the opportunity for the celebration of diasporic achievement and success, for cultural maintenance through its remembering of the Korean War, and for empowerment of the diasporic community Lee 2004, p.233. At the same time, the allusions to other films, the subtlety of the films style as expressed through camerawork, editing, sound and music as well as mastery of digital animation techniques and a structure familiar from mainstream Hollywood cinema mark the film as a knowing and learned contribution to international screen culture. ........

Source: Wikipedia