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.
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)
