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Sea, Star, Woman

I return to a country I chose to leave, Korea, to find meaning in my mother’s deleted image.

synopsis

My mother left our home in Korea when I was 7. We lived as if our father’s new wife was our real mother. My first name changed, we moved, I enrolled in a new school. My mother was a fallen woman never to be talked about. I could only stare at holes cut out of family photos, knowing it was her. Years later, now a filmmaker in France, I suddenly started having vertigo attacks that prevented me from working – my brain was deleting one of my eyes’ two images instead of merging them. As my world span, my thoughts turned to the blind spot in my existence: my mother. I learnt my father accused her of adultery, a crime in Korea until 2015. Sentenced to 8 months in jail, with no support from her family, she had to resign as a teacher and didn’t own a place to live. What was it like to be stamped an ill-reputed woman and shunned by 90’s Korean society? This film will try to unravel how losing her heart-breaking battle to be our mother led her to emigrate to the US, forgotten by those she loved.

Director’statement

I want to understand how law, convention and people’s decisions can combine to erase a woman, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a teacher, and Korean citizen. But my mother’s absence will only be a starting point. As I try to piece together a picture of her, I will gather contradictory, sometimes unreliable, recollections from individuals, objects and places that hold memories of her in Korea and the US, her adoptive country. I will record site-specific sounds and images of everyday life to help portray her story – like the densely packed and standardised Korean housing modules that reflect the strict moral and societal codes that govern the Korean population and define family life there. Beginning as a personal sound and image scrapbook of fragmentary truths and improbable situations, I will playfully weave together different cinematic forms – archival footage, portraits, eye-rehabilitation inspired animation, and re-enacted childhood memories – allowing my mother to gradually re-appear.

TFL PROGRAMME:
FeatureLab 2024

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