Press Kit
Film Summary
In November of 2018 Kyungmin Park spent seven days in Helsinki. These are her stories. Award-winning filmmaker Jesse Borkowski (Real Value) presents an intimate, meditative, poetic, look at the life and work of internationally celebrated figurative sculpture artist Kyungmin Park (Emerging Artist, NCECA).
Seven Days in Helsinki: Conversations with Kyungmin Park does not attempt to be a complete biography and eschews a linear biographical approach. There is a heavy focus on childhood memory, and what was at the time, current artistic work. And so, while this is certainly a documentary about figurative sculpture and ceramics, it is also heavily about memory, creation, and the abstraction generated when expression and experience is filtered through point of view.
Representing the work of creation might not always be dramatic, or fun, but it is the oft hidden reality that exists for all artists. The value of art is in this time, this expertise, this passion. Art is slow. It requires focus. Patience. Dedication. To minimize this effort would be to reduce art, Kyungmin’s art, to a mere commodity, which it clearly is not. And so, the film intentionally mirrors its structure and approach to that of the content and allows the audience time to watch and reflect as the process and stories unfold.
Jesse Borkowski
Jesse Borkowski is an award-winning filmmaker with extensive production, distribution, and marketing experience. Jesse holds a Masters in Business Administration from Elon University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film and Animation from Rochester Institute of Technology. Jesse is a nationally recognized Princess Grace Award recipient, a Jury Prize winner at the Golden Wheat Awards, a Jury Prize winner at the Szeged International Super8 Film Festival, and a First Place winner at the After Hours Film Festival. Jesse’s first feature length film, Real Value, is an award-winning economics documentary that delivers a refreshing meditation on how business can be used to create value beyond profit. The film was an official selection of The South African Eco Film Festival, The Sustainable Living Film Festival, and has screened dozens of times internationally.
Instagram: instagram.com/jesseborkowski
Kyungmin Park
Originally from South Korea, Kyungmin earned her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Georgia in 2012 and her BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2008. Currently, Kyungmin is an Assistant Professor of 3D studio Art at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. Park was a long-term resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana where she earned the 2014-2015 Matsutani Fellowship and the 2015-2016 Windgate Fellowship. Park has won multiple awards; her most recent recognition being from the National Council on Education the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), which granted her the 2016 Emerging Artist of the Year Award; Ceramics Monthly Magazine also gave her that same designation in 2015. Kyungmin was invited as a 2017 Guest Artist at the Jingdezhen International Studio in Taoxichuan Ceramic Park, Jingdezhen, China and one of her recent exhibitions, 74th Scripps College Ceramic Annual show in 2018, was featured in the LA Times.
Instagram: instagram.com/kyungminpark929
