GKF May Film

About this event

This event includes a pre-film reception, with light refreshments, followed by a screening of Dir. Jang Hoon’s A Taxi Driver (2017) and a post-film conversation with special guests.

Film Synopsis: In this powerful true story set in 1980, a down-on-his-luck taxi driver from Seoul is hired by a foreign journalist who wants to go to the town of Gwangju for the day. They arrive to find a city under siege by the military government, with the citizens, led by a determined group of college students, rising up to demand freedom. German reporter Jürgen Hinzpeter and KIM Sa-bok, the taxi driver who drove him to Gwangju, become caught in a life-or-death struggle in the midst of the Gwangju Uprising, a critical event in modern South Korea.

BIOS FOR COLUMBIA, MO EVENT:

MODERATOR: RYAN FAMULINER, is the News Director at KBIA-FM, and an Associate Professional Practice Professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining KBIA in 2011, he previously worked as a general assignment reporter and videographer at WNDU-TV in South Bend, Indiana, and as a reporter and anchor at the Missourinet radio network in Jefferson City, Missouri. He’s reported nationally on NPR and WNYC’s The Takeaway. Ryan has won multiple national Sigma Delta Chi, Edward R. Murrow and PRNDI Awards for his reporting and editing work, as well as scores of state and regional awards. 

Ryan has overseen or contributed to numerous collaborative projects across the Missouri School of Journalism newsrooms, including the creation of the state government data project Access Missouri, production of the short documentary project “My Life, My Town” and partnerships with Vox Magazine and Missouri Business Alert. 

PANELIST: SEUNGKWON YOU, Ph.D. completed his master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science at the University of Missouri. He is the director of the Global Leadership Program and Asian Scholars Program at the Asian Affairs Center, which hosts more than 70 Asian professionals, including Koreans, Chinese and Thais. Additionally, he is an associate teaching professor for the Korean Studies Program at MU, and has been teaching courses on Korean society through cinema and U.S.-Korean relations for the past 15 years. Seungkwon is very interested in environmental justice, globalization and democratization.

 PANELIST: KATHY KIELY is the Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is a veteran reporter and editor with a multimedia portfolio and a passion for transparency, free speech and teaching. After a long career covering politics in Washington, Kathy moved into the classroom full-time because, she says, universities are the laboratories that will discover the formula for making fact-based journalism viable again. A 2017-18 journalism lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, Kathy has also taught at American University, George Washington University and Princeton University.

As the inaugural Press Freedom Fellow for the National Press Club‘s nonprofit Journalism Institute, Kathy has organized events around free speech issues and advocated for journalists who have been jailed or threatened for their work. Kathy covered Congress and national politics for USA TODAY, headed Washington bureaus for The Houston Post and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was a White House correspondent for the New York Daily News and a general assignment reporter and Washington correspondent for The Pittsburgh Press.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s degree from American University and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

ST. LOUIS EVENT:

MODERATOR: RYAN FAMULINER (bio above)

PANELIST: SEUNGKWON YOU, Ph.D. (bio above)

PANELIST: ROD MILAM is a broadcaster originally from University City. He started working at KWMU in the early 90s and helped start the talk show “Cityscape/Talk of St. Louis” before it became “St. Louis on the Air”. He later, simultaneously, also worked in the news and sports departments as a reporter at KMOX in the late 90s. He did correspondent work for CBS Radio, CNN Radio, the AP, Radio France Internationale, and others while in St. Louis, and then moved to Tokyo, Japan and did freelance reporting while teaching English. 

After reporting for CBS and CNN during the 9/11 attacks, Rod eventually moved to New York City, but left media for several years upon arriving. After 2008, he went back to media in the form of a videographer, video producer/director, voiceover artist, and documentarian based in New York City. He started “The University City Musician Documentary Project” in NYC before he came back to St. Louis after more than a dozen years. Since then he has worked with the arts and culture channel HEC Media both in front of and behind the camera. Now, he's also back at St. Louis Public Radio after 20+ years and fills in hosting on the air for Morning Edition,  All Things Considered, and St. Louis on the Air.