“Gina Kim’s Video Diary,” Kim’s first feature, is a self-portrait of the filmmaker’s struggle with anorexia and loneliness.

 

LEFT: In “Never Forever,” Andrew (David McInnis) and his wife, Sophie (Vera Farmiga), struggle with infertility. • RIGHT: Out of desperation, Sophie asks Jihah (Jung-Woo Ha) to impregnate her.

 

Gina Kim on location while shooting “Never Forever.”

 

Gina Kim stares down at my shoes disapprovingly. She politely reminds me to ditch my Chuck Taylors at the door before offering a glimpse inside her comfy Irvine, Calif., home.

While the 33-year-old filmmaker has lived in the States for more than a decade, she is a self-proclaimed “Korean Korean,” unwilling to bend when it comes to the cardinal house guest rule.

However, inside the charming suburban home she shares with her husband, Kyung-Hyun, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, Kim is at ease discussing “Never Forever,” the film that has earned her industry cred.

The toast of big name festivals worldwide — beginning with its January premiere at Sundance where it earned a Grand Jury Prize nomination for best dramatic feature — “Never Forever” came to life three years ago. That’s when Kim found herself immersed in the predominately Irish-Catholic community of Boston during her two-year stint teaching Korean cinema at Harvard University.

“That really inspired me because I was never fully exposed to mainstream white culture,” she says. “Because of that, I became more aware of my own race than ever before.”

Kim often frequented Chinatown, which was the closest thing to Korean culture she could find in Boston. “I started to think about all these issues of race and sexuality, masculinity and femininity. I always knew that Asian women were overly sexualized in mainstream Western culture, but how come Asian men are completely desexualized in this culture?”

The question inspired Kim to write the script that follows a white housewife, Sophie (Vera Farmiga from “The Departed”), and her infertile Korean American husband, Andrew (David McInnis). Devastated by their inability to conceive a child, Andrew spirals into a deep depression, leading to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Desperate to save her marriage, Sophie follows an illegal Korean immigrant, Jihah (Jung-Woo Ha), home from a sperm bank and offers him a shocking proposition: no-strings-attached sex for cash, including a significant bonus if she conceives a child. Things prove potentially disastrous when she discovers deeper feelings for Jihah.

Kim says her teaching gig, which provided her a chance to revisit the Korean classics, also served as a source of inspiration for the film.

“People say that the Korean cinema industry is just really fantastic these days, but compared to the ‘60s, it’s just really lame,” she laments. Kim was taken by the powerful, subversive female characters of the era, a far cry from modern films that reduce female actors to what Kim describes as “ghostly figures.”