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JiYoon Park is an artist filmmaker who makes creative non-fiction cinema, currently based in Seoul, South Korea. She explored temporality through short films ‘The Way We Wait’(2020) and ‘Once Upon a Time’(2020). And through ‘Like You Know It All’(2021) and ‘Out of Place’(2022), she attempted to depict the unfathomable vastness of human mind. 

Juxtaposition and recontextualisation is her main filmmaking style. By capturing surreal and unfamiliar moments, she tried to find hidden and unexpected meanings in our daily lives. Her films were shown worldwide in galleries, TV channels and numerous festivals, including AFI Docs, IDFA and Ji.hlava IDFF. They were also nominated for several awards in Cairo Int’l Film Festival, Open City Docs and won an award in DMZ Docs.  

︎︎︎works  
︎︎︎notes on the films 



Selections & Screenings  
2023
- Ordinary World, Korean Cultural Centre, Berlin, DE
- Art Support Grant RE:SEARCH, Seoul Foundation of Arts and Culture
- TAPE Collective, London, UK / programe with UCL Film Soc’s Fest
- NOWNESS Experiments / online publishing 
2022
- Grants for Researching Int’l Art Platforms, ARKO Arts Council Korea
2021
- San Diego Asian Film Festival, San Diego, US / official selection
- Ji.hlava IDFF, Jihlava, CZ / short film competition
- EBS Int’l Documentary Festival, Goyang, KR / official selection
- Equinoxio Film Festival, Bogota, CO / official selection
- Otherfield Film Festival, East Sussex, UK / official selection 
- Lago Film Fest, Revine Lago, IT / official selection
- Pragovka Gallery, Prague, CZ / special screening
- Seoul Ind Women’s Film Festival, Seoul, KR / short film competition
- AFI Docs, Washington, D.C., US / short film competition
- Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, Glasgow, UK / official selection
- Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Hawick, UK / official selection
- Echoes of 24th Ji.hlava IDFF, Jihlava, CZ / special screening
- Future Now Symposium, York, UK / special screening 
- Grants for Participating in Int’l Film Festivals, Korean Film Council
- Selected for the Ind Film Archive Collection Project, Korean Film Archive
2020 
- Women Filmmakers Support Fund, Seoul Int'l Women’s Film Festival
- Cairo Int'l Film Festival, Cairo, EG / short film competition
- IDFA, Amsterdam, NL / student documentary competition
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, UK / official selection
- Ji.hlava IDFF, Jihlava, CZ / competition for experimental films
- DMZ Docs, Goyang, KR / short documentary award winner (Dir, Prod, Ed) 
- Open City Documentary Festival, London, UK / UK short film award nominee



Education
2019 MA - Film Directing, Edinburgh College of Art, UK
2017 BA - Television and Film & Art History, Ewha Womans[sic] University, KR
2014 Exchange Programme in Art History, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ES



Programme
2022 a member of Louise the Women - Network of Female Artists in Visual Arts

︎︎︎︎︎︎


The Way We Wait

(2020, 11’) 


      


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. 


- Open City Doc Festival 2020, ‘Between Generations’ UK Short Film Award Nominee World Premiere, London, UK
- DMZ Docs 2020, Short Documentary Award Winner Goyang, KR ︎︎︎Programme Note
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2020, Artists’ Film-memory&Future Now Syumposum 2021 by Aesthetica Magazine York, UK
- IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2020, Student Documentary Competition Amsterdam, NL

- Cairo Int'l Film Festival 2020, Special Jury Award&Youssef Chahin Award Nominee Cairo, EG
- AFI Docs 2021 by American Film Institute, Short Film Competition Silver Spring, Maryland and Washington, D.C, US
- Equinoxio Film Festival 2021, ‘Celestial Bodies’ Bogota, CO
- collected and preserved in Korean Film Archive
︎︎︎ watch the full film on True Story
with YoungJa Kim, TaeYeon Kang
Director, Producer and Editor: JiYoon Park
Executive Producer: Emma Davie
Cinematographers: Julian Triandafyllou, JiYoon Park
Sound Designer: Simon Howard 
Sand Sculptor: Jack Handscombe


    


                                       

(The film interconnects disparate images—my grandmother’s hospital, her impermanent house, and the process of building a sandcastle that is not even likely to barely survive from the waves of the ocean. This whole process seems to be a desperate attempt to delay the moment of sadness in the near future as much as possible. It is a film about the coming loss, but at the same time, about hope as well. Losses are always with us even in this moment, but here, by properly looking and documenting the process, I wanted to share that life is not in such an emptiness as we think it is. It was an intent to connect the far future and the distant past, overcoming the current context of loss or uncertainty by leaning on that vastness of time. - director’s notes)

  


"The short film ‘The Way We Wait’ uses the traces of space and corporeal disappearance to talk about memory and vital fragility."  (...) "Through narrative and visual conventions, JiYoon Park establishes the possibility of shaping time through the camera despite the inescapable course of nature: the tide that is approaching." (...) "Imagination, dreams, memories and daydreams are key factors for the creation of the image. From the dream story, the filmmaker weaves the images to expose the fragility of time and being." (...) "In a phenomenological narrative of accompaniment and the moment, grandmother and granddaughter support each other; the past no longer matters and the future will flow." (...)
- written by Daniela Ruiz Cerquera (Correspondencias Cine)

   
   

<<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 




Once Upon a Time 

(2020, 5’)


   


A film poem in which human consciousness intertwines with the element of water. The film resists a closed life narrative by negating a reductive assessment of one’s history. / 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. The film tactically presents the transformation of water through the use of on screen texts. (watch the full film below)


- Ji.hlava International Doc Film Festival 2020 & Echoes of Ji.hlava IDFF 2021, ‘Fascinations’ experimental film competition World Premiere, Jihlava, CZ
- Alchemy Film & Arts Festival 2021,  ‘A Human Certainty’ Hawick, UK 
- Pragovka Gallery 2021, special screening with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’  Prague, CZ
- Lago Film Fest 2021, ‘New Signs’ experimental film competition Revine Lago, IT ︎︎︎Programme Note
- NOWNESS Experiments 2023, online publishing & watch the full film
- TAPE Collective 2023, programme with UCL Film Soc’s Fest ‘Tracing Entanglements’ London, UK 
 
<<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

<<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 & Arts Festival)

(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. - director’s notes)

© JiYoon Park. Embedding, unauthorised copying and replication are prohibited for this video & images.
 
   

     

     

   

   

     

     


Like You Know It All  

(2021, 11’)


      

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.  (watch the excerpt below)


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


Director, Producer, Cinematographer and Editor: JiYoon Park
with KwangJa Lee  Sound and Music: 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


<<A very effective and moving exploration of the role of a telephone counsellor. Good use of abstract imagery which allows full engagement with the subject matter.>> - a comment from the doc alliance platform


(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. - director’s notes)

Out of Place

(2023, 5’)


     

‘Out of Place’ revolves around a fictional concept of escaping the earth. It was created as a research process and as a work-in-progress film for a feature non-fiction. 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. (watch the excerpt below)  


    

   

   
 


hide and seek

(2017, 14’ 22”)


   



An essay film based on the images and sounds I collected from various places between 2014 and 2017. A woman is looking for the traces of someone she once knew. How can she find absence in the presence and presence in the absence? This film is a musing on time - exploring how the past, present and future are inextricably and mysteriously connected. 
2014부터 2017년까지 다양한 장소에서 직접 모은 이미지들과 사운드를 기반으로 한 에세이 필름. 한 여자가 예전에 알던 어떤 사람의 자취를 찾고 있다. 그녀는 어떻게 존재하는 것들로부터 부재함을, 부재하는 것들로부터 존재함을 발견할 수 있을까? 이 영화는 시간 자체에 대한 묵상으로, 과거와 현재 그리고 미래가 어떻게 불가분 하게, 또한 신비롭게 연결되어 있는지를 탐구한다.


notes on the films  (2020-2023)


In my works, image, narration-text and sound are disparately intertwined with each other, and they co-exist by complementing one another. The third existence, which is non-human, seems to observes and stares at the situation inside the films. Through this, I intended to create a paradoxical and supernatural atmosphere, which transcends time-space dimension. 

‘The Way We Wait’(2020) conveys consciousness towards time, the moments when we confront the finiteness of life. It emphasises that this finiteness allows us to see the most trivial parts of our daily lives to be special.  ‘Once Upon a Time’(2020) shows the memories of the past could be reinterpreted, thereby it is impossible to reduce one’s life in a single perspective. I tried to convey a sense of freedom by tactilely presenting the whole transforming process of the perspective about memory.

‘Like You Know It All’(2021) focuses on exploring the possibility to respect each one’s undefinable parts, the spots that are not able to be known, that ambiguity and distance. ‘Out of Place’(2022~2023) deals with the action of ‘seeing’ itself through optical instruments and asks what truly is to perceive the women’s lived experiences.

The Way We Wait - 
The film interconnects disparate images—my grandmother’s hospital, her impermanent house, and the process of building a sandcastle. This whole process seems to be a desperate attempt to delay the moment of sadness in the near future as much as possible. It was an intent to connect the far future and the distant past, overcoming the current context of loss or uncertainty by leaning on that vastness of time.

Once Upon a Time - 
This film depicts a moment when we are unexpectedly overwhelmed by past memories and how to get out of it. There surely is a time when what I have documented in the past is read in a different way. Through interpreting the same experience in a different way with a time-parallax, I wanted to show the possibility that meaning and context are unfixed. 

Like You Know It All - 
There are no human faces in the film, but instead, there are certain places and movements where we get to imagine the stories of the anonymous people. It was an attempt to capture the immeasurable, the vast terrain of the human mind. It is true that we would never fully get to know the other’s mind, but it was a process of exploration to find out what it is to continuously try to understand and imagine that unfathomable depth of mind. 

Out of Place - 
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. Ultimately, I have wanted to present the possibility that the meanings and contexts surrounding us are flexible and mutable.

by JiYoon Park




작품노트  (2020-2023)


작품들에서 이미지와 내레이션-텍스트 그리고 사운드는 서로 이질적으로 맞물리며 각자를 보완하는 효과를 만들어낸다. 또한 사람이 거의 나오지 않거나, 인간이 아닌 제3의 존재가 사람이나 상황을 응시하고 관찰하는 듯한 스타일이 일관되게 나타난다. 이처럼 일상의 사물들을 낯설게 표현함으로써 기이한 풍경들을 만들어내고, 꿈과 현실을 오가는 듯 시공간을 초월한 초현실적인 분위기를 담아내려 했다.  

‘우리가 기다리는 동안에’(2020)는 시간에 대한 자각, 즉 시간의 유한함을 맞닥뜨리는 순간들을 보여준다. 덧없음과 일시성을 영화 전면에 드러내지만, 오히려 그 유한함으로 인해 일상의 사소한 부분을 특별하게 바라볼 수 있음을 강조한다. ‘아주 오래전에’(2020)는 과거의 기억을 새로운 시각으로 재해석할 수 있음을, 따라서 각자의 삶은 한 가지 해석으로 환원될 수 없음을 보여주는 작업이었다. 기억에 대한 관점이 바뀌는 과정을 촉각적으로 보여줌으로써 어떤 해방감과 회복성을 전달하려 했다.

‘잘 알지도 못하면서’(2021)는 인간 각자가 지닌 정의할 수 없는 부분, 다 알 수 없는 지점, 그 모호함과 거리에 대한 존중을 유지하며 천천히 변화 가능성을 모색하려 한 작업이다. ‘제자리에 있지 않은’(2022~2023)은 픽션같은 설정을 기반으로, 당연하게 존재하는 현실임에도 불구하고 현실로서 인식되지 못하는 어떤 현실에 대해 제대로 들여다보는 작업이었다.

우리가 기다리는 동안에  - 
영화는 곧 사라질 할머니의 집, 할머니가 지내던 병원, 그리고 파도로 인해 무너질 것 같은 모래성이 가까스로 지어지는 과정 등 다른 종류의 푸티지들을 교차시켜 보여준다. 이 모든 과정은 곧 있을 슬픔의 순간을 늦추려는 절박한 시도처럼 보인다. 다가오는 상실에 대한 영화인 동시에 희망에 대한 영화이다. 상실은 언제나 우리와 함께하지만, 그 과정을 제대로 바라보고 기록함으로써 삶이 그렇게 허무하지만은 않음을 공유하고 싶었다. 아주 먼 미래와 먼 과거를 연결하며, 그 커다란 시간에 기대어 현재의 상실감이나 불확실함을 극복하려는 의도였다.

아주 오래전에 - 
영화는 예상치 못하게 과거의 기억들에 압도되는 순간을 그린다. 동시에 거기서 어떻게 빠져나오는지를 그리며, 기록이 어떻게 자기 치유의 기능을 하는지를 탐구한다. 내가 과거에 기록했던 것이 현재의 나에게 다른 방식으로 읽히고 새로운 의미로 다가올 때가 있다. 같은 경험을 시차를 두고 다르게 해석함으로써, 의미와 맥락은 고정되어 있지 않고 변하기에 우리는 더 나은 방향으로 변할 수 있고 동시에 더 자유로워질 수 있다는 가능성을 보여주고자 했다.

잘알지도 못하면서 - 
영화에는 사람의 얼굴이 등장하지 않고, 대신 익명의 사람들의 이야기를 상상할 수 있는 장소들과 움직임이 나온다. 인간 마음의 헤아릴 수 없는 광활한 지형을 담아내고자 하는 시도였다. 타인의 마음은 결코 다 알 수 없겠지만, 그 알 수 없는 깊이를 상상하며 이해하려고 끊임없이 시도하는 것이 무엇인지를 탐구하는 과정이었다. 눈에 보이지 않는 것들을 보이게 하려는 시도를 통해, 다큐멘터리의 윤리성을 전면적으로 고민할 수 있었다.

제자리에 있지 않은 - 
영화는 광학장치들을 통해 ‘본다는 것' 그 자체에 대해, 그리고 여성들의 ‘현실'을 제대로 바라보는 것이 무엇인지 질문을 던진다. 한국 여성인 동시에 아시안 여성으로 살아가며 자주 마주하는 현실은, 우리에게 공기처럼 당연하게 존재하는 현실임에도 그 현실이 현실로서 취급되지 않은 경우가 많다. 궁극적으로 우리를 둘러싼 의미와 맥락은 고정되어 있지 않고 변하기에, 우리는 더 자유로워질 수 있다는 가능성을 보여주고자 했다.

글. 박지윤 

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