Desperately building against the inevitability of time, a restless young woman is awaiting another upcoming loss. But maybe more important things never seem to be told. 

Soon after the director moves into her 22nd house, she gets a phone call that her Grandma, who lives far away, is in a critical condition. Elsewhere, a huge apartment made of sand is being constructed as the tide rolls in, while she belatedly tries to build a relationship with her Gran. As the camera sensitively observes how we wait for the upcoming days, the film embraces the fragility of life, full of uncertainty. -> trailer

 
- Open City Doc Festival 2020, London, UK, Between Generations (UK Short Film Award Nominee) World Premiere
- DMZ Docs 2020, Goyang, KR, Short Competition (Short Documentary Award Winner) ︎︎︎Programme Note
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2020, York, UK, Artists’ Film-memory(pp. 198~199) & Future Now Symposium 2021 by Aesthetica Magazine
- IDFA 2020, Amsterdam, NL, Student Documentary Competition  

- Cairo Int'l Film Festival 2020, Cairo, EG, Cinema of Tomorrow (Special Jury Award&Youssef Chahin Award Nominee) 
- AFI Docs 2021, Silver Spring, Maryland and Washington, D.C, US, Short Film Competition
- Korean Film Archive, collected 2021 
*The full film is available upon request. For screening inquiries, please get in touch via email.

with Young-Ja Kim, Tae-Yeon Kang
Director, Producer and Editor: Ji-Yoon Park
Executive Producer: Emma Davie
Cinematographers: Julian Triandafyllou, Ji-Yoon Park
Sound Designer: Simon Howard

Sand Sculptor: Jack Handscombe

Film Introduction  /  correspondenciascine.com/2022/01/the-way-we-wait-de-ji-yoon-park/   

    

<<Hearing upon the news that her grandmother is in a critical condition, the director juxtaposes her grandmother’s footage and the process that a small sand apartment is built on a quiet beach. There may not be any logical relevance between the two images. However, a loose correspondence can be found in building a relationship in a limited time before death and building a sand house that will soon be collapsed. The two images aren’t just what they appear to be but represent an attempt to compensate for the loss in her absence in the future while the completed sand building alludes to the fact the grains of sand will be swept away by the waves. The film attempts to perceive the external from the personal, and the incompleteness of the present from the present reality.>> - written by Lee Minho(DMZ Docs) 

<<Shortly after moving into her 22nd house, Ji-Yoon Park receives a call: far away her grandmother is in the hospital, in critical condition. Too late, the director realizes that she should have nurtured her relationship with her grandmother earlier. “I’ve always been chased by time,” the restless young woman says. “I’ve needed to run harder not to be swallowed.” Now, she doesn’t know how to spend time with her grandmother. “So I was left holding the camera.” In parallel with scenes at the hospital, on the seashore an apartment building is being sculpted from sand—in vain, as its destruction is inevitable. The tide is approaching and slowly nibbling at the foundations. This house of sand mirrors events at the hospital. Sensitively observing as she awaits the imminent loss, the filmmaker embraces the fragility of life, with all its uncertainty. “What I grasp today, easily shatters tomorrow.”>> - written by IDFA 

There is a waterfall somewhere without a sign of human activity. Through the shiny surface of the rapid torrent, words emerge and approach closer to the centre. A tape machine whirs, the nostalgia is relentless. An essay film about the unexpected compulsion to revisit the past. It encompasses both the ‘weird urge’ to follow bad memories and the ‘resistance’ against the power of the past. -> trailer

- Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival 2020, Jihlava, CZ, Fascinations - competition for experimental films World Premiere & Echoes of 24th Ji.hlava IDFF in 2021, selected as one of the best experimental films from Fascinations section 
- Alchemy Film and Arts Festival 2021, Hawick, UK, Official Selection, A Human Certainty 
- Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2021, Glasgow, UK, Official Selection - Nature 
- Pragovka Gallery, Prague, CZ, special screening with 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Lago Film Fest 2021, Revine Lago, IT, Experimental Film Competition: New Signs  ︎︎︎Programme Note  
- NOWNESS ASIA, HK, nowness experiment︎ nowness youtube︎

Written, Filmed, Edited by Ji-Yoon Park 
Special Thanks to Julian Triandafyllou 

<<In Once Upon a Time, Ji-Yoon Park juxtaposes a video sequence of serene flowing waters with the filmmaker’s own struggle to revisit her past via running onscreen text. Park’s film deals with self-image, resisting a closed life narrative by negating a reductive assessment of one’s history. The ambiguities of reliving memory while longing to move towards a reconciliation foster multiple temporalities of healing.>> - written by Marius Hrdy(Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival)

<<A film poem in which human consciousness intertwines with the element of water. The leitmotif flowing through the entire work is memory, the eternal clash between the urge to look back and the awareness of space and time ahead. The river flooding the film not only gives it a temporythmic structure but is also a reminder of the eternal natural order.>> - written by Ji.hlava IDFF 

(Describing the moments when the body and mind become unexpectedly overwhelmed by memories. The words and sentences fragmentarily interfere; the sounds incessantly surge and disappear in a moment; the images keep moving. Unlike the title, this film is not only about the past, but is also about the future. The film explores how documentation can function as a mode of self-healing. )

      

Kwang-Ja Lee, a counsellor at ‘Lifeline Korea’ has been listening to anonymous people’s stories for 45 years. Every day, she is all ears to stories that cannot be shared anywhere else. Image and sound react to it and creates new reflective space that seems to be the bottom of one’s heart. 

About thirty-seven people kill themselves every day in South Korea. And it often ranks the highest suicide rate in the world. These days, ‘Lifeline Korea’ gets around 60 calls a day. This film isn’t simply about emphasising serious suicide rate of South Korea, nor is it about providing solutions. Rather, it tries to shed light on how people and society should approach the suicide matter. How can we look into other people’s problems properly? And how can we change our attitudes to empathy? As seen in the title, ‘Like You Know It All’ questions our attitude towards other people’s problems. -> trailer

- Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2021, Glasgow, UK, Normality? 2 - official selection World Premiere
- Seoul Ind Women’s Film Festival 2021, Seoul, KR, Official Selection, Short Film Competition
- EBS Int'l Documentary Festival 2021, Goyang and EBS TV, KR, Contemporary Docs Panorama  ︎︎︎작품 보기
- Jeju Hondie Film Festival 2021, Jeju, KR, Short Film Competition 
- Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival 2021, Jihlava, CZ, Short Joy - short film competition
- San Diego Asian Film Festival 2021, San Diego, US, Official Selection

*The full film is available upon request. For screening inquiries, please do get in touch via email.

with Kwang-Ja Lee
Director, Producer, Cinematographer and Editor: Ji-Yoon Park
Sound and Music Composer: Ellie Beale  

<<A conversation with a suicide hotline worker in South Korea plays over footage of everyday life. Text, image, and voiceover combine to produce a stunning and moving portrait of the often thankless work of care.>> - written by San Diego Asian Film Festival

(Interview was conducted only through audio, as counsellors in ‘Lifeline Korea’ have conversations via phone. After repetitively listening to these interviews, I filmed images that went along with the stories. There are no human faces throughout the film. Instead, there are places and movements that help audiences imagine the story of the interview better. It was all part of making intangible things observable.)

   

Surviving both as Korean and Asian women, we try to escape with a novel voyage from this Earth to another planet. When the bizarre statistics on us and the nonvisualised epic gather on this new planet, the voices from the ones who breathe here with one another form echoes, which continue as a round. There, the voices that this society has taught about us, and the voices we speak out for ourselves, coexist like a twin. At the moment of those two voices intersecting and colliding with each other, an unexpected scenery could be found throughout this entire film. This short documentary film is a prologue of a feature documentary and was created during its research process. 

[제자리에 있지 않은] 한국 여성인 동시에 아시안 여성으로 지구에서 살아가며 새로운 행성으로의 탈출을 상상한다. 우리를 둘러싼 통계들과 그 기이한 숫자들이 하는 말, 가시화되지 못한 서사가 이 새로운 행성에 모인다. 그리고 그 사이에서 숨 쉬는 존재들의 목소리가 돌림노래로 이어진다. 사회가 우리에 대해 말해온 목소리와 우리가 스스로에 대해 말하는 목소리, 이 두 가지가 교차하고 충돌하며 태어나는 새로운 풍경을 발견하고자 한다. 장편 프로젝트의 프롤로그이자 리서치 과정에서 만든 단편 다큐멘터리다. 

excerpt -> The Stream(Korean Video Art Archive)

(The reality we face living both as Korean and Asian women, is actually the status quo that is taken for granted just like the air. Meanwhile, this reality is often treated as if it was not the authentic ‘reality’ in many cases. For that reason, this film deals with the action of ‘Seeing’ itself through optical instruments and asks us the genuine question of what truly is to perceive the women’s ‘reality’ and lived experiences.  

Ultimately, this film portrays a desire to be anything and everything, throwing out the boxes that articulate and limit self to be Women or Asian. All it sings is about the craving, the desperate voice to exist as a same human being, a strong “No” to the status quo. I have wanted to present the possibility that we could change toward better directions as well as being more free, because the meanings and contexts surrounding us are flexible and mutable.)

(한국 여성인 동시에 아시안 여성으로 살아가며 마주하는 현실은, 우리에게 공기처럼 당연하게 존재하는 현실임에도 불구하고 그 현실이 ‘현실’로서 취급되지 않은 경우가 많다. 따라서 영화는 광학장치들을 통해 ‘본다는 것' 그 자체에 대해, 그리고 여성들의 ‘현실'을 제대로 바라보는 것이 무엇인지 질문을 던진다.

이 영화는 궁극적으로 여성도 아시안도 아닌 그저 무엇이든 될 수 있는 한 인간으로 존재하고 싶음에 대해, ‘제자리’에 있고 싶지 않음에 대해 노래한다. 우리를 둘러싼 의미와 맥락은 고정되어 있지 않고 변하기에, 우리는 더 나은 방향으로 변할 수 있고 동시에 더 자유로워질 수 있다는 가능성을 보여주고자 했다.)

2022년 7월, 박지윤
July. 2022, Ji-Yoon Park

*The full film is available upon request. For screening inquiries, please do get in touch via email.
Written, Filmed and Edited by Ji-Yoon Park