Documentary Series · 4 Episodes
A four-part documentary broadcast on Bugaboo TV in Thailand
A cinematic documentary series introducing Korean culture to Thailand. It felt like something only possible from a position of respect for Thai culture, so a Thai influencer carries the shift in her own feeling directly, through interview and narration, and that is what makes it persuasive.
JANG: The Soul of K-Food is a four-part cinematic documentary broadcast on Bugaboo TV, a local Thai OTT service.
Perspective
The Korean wave is blowing through Thailand too. Korean culture is not hard to find anywhere in Bangkok, and K-food is riding that current. But what Thai people know of Korean food is, as it is everywhere else, kimchi, bibimbap, and barbecue.
We knew that the real strength of K-food, hidden behind those main dishes, comes from jang. Only through the eyes of a foreigner who likes Korean food while knowing it in fragments does a cultural approach become possible.
Planning
“With good jang in the house, you need nothing else.”
Korean proverb · the plan opens with this line
The subject was jang, but what was designed was a person. Instead of explaining jang, the film lays out the path a Thai person's feeling travels on first meeting it. A person is not material, a person is the reason. Places were not left as backdrop either. From a Bangkok table to a jangdokdae on Jeju, each was chosen as a vessel that holds feeling.
A good scene is not an accident. It is born on top of preparation. Before a camera was picked up, five speakers were decided. Piglet, and four people who work with jang in Bangkok and on Jeju. Then the arc and locations of the four parts, and the manner of telling, interview form and film-look recreation, were all settled on paper.
“Making jang is my fate.
In the end someone has to keep the tradition.”
Approach
The cinematic documentary form was chosen to go deep into the subject while holding the quality of the picture. Rather than have the lead drive the story, the interview form keeps her inside it, so the grain of the genre is never broken.
A message that begins from the eyes of an outsider who does not know the subject well earns its persuasiveness through the expert interviews. The key scenes were rebuilt as film-look recreations to add something worth watching.
The Series · 4 Episodes
Bangkok is a city known for Korean food. Piglet eats it often but does not know it well. Looking at the side dishes that always arrive alongside the main course, she starts to get curious about Korean food, and the owner of a Korean barbecue restaurant in Bangkok tells her the story.
Arriving on Jeju, Piglet meets a jang master and makes and tastes doenjang, ganjang, gochujang, and ssamjang. Watching a master who has kept to the same slow, inconvenient method for nineteen years, she understands that jang is Korea's soul food.
What jang she has learned about actually does in food is confirmed at a Jeju table. Braised cutlassfish reduced in gochujang and ganjang, seafood doenjang stew, and the ssamjang that always follows black pork. That jang is what completes the taste behind the main dish is proved right there on the table.
Back from learning about jang in Korea, Piglet wonders whether there are Thai people who know it well. The Thai owner of a dakgalbi restaurant in Bangkok tells her how he handles soy-based seasoning, and looking at the jang that turns out to be easy to find in Bangkok too, she comes to hope Thailand's own traditions are kept and grown the same way.
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