ACF
Asian Cinema Fund
Post-Production Fund
2024 Post-Production Fund
LIST Spring Night
| Category | Korean Project |
|---|---|
| Project | Spring Night |
| Director | KANG Mija |
| Country | Korea |
| Director's Profile |
Kang Mija was born in 1966 in Gongju, Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea. She works as an editor on films and dramas, and teaches film editing at Korea National University of Arts. She learned about ‘film’ from Kwon Byeong-soon, director of the Experimental Film Institute. Her 16mm short film, Deep or Quiet (1998), won the Excellence Award at the Image Forum Festival 1999 in Japan and screened in the Wide Angle section at Busan International Film Festival 1998. Her first feature film, Let the Blue River Run (2008), screened in the Korean Cinema Today - Vision section at Busan International Film Festival 2008 and was opening film at Seoul Independent Film Festival 2008. Spring Night (2024) is her second feature film. |
- Synopsis
-
Yeong-gyeong, an alcoholic, and Su-hwan, a rheumatoid arthritis patient, meet for the first time at a friend′s wedding. Both their own marriages failed.
Su-hwan, an iron worker since the age of 20, filed for a divorce on paper, at his wife′s suggestion, when his ironworks went bankrupt and he became a credit delinquent saddled with huge debts. After the supposedly fake divorce, Su-hwan′s wife sold off all their remaining property, of which he was completely unaware, and disappeared without a trace. Owing so much debt, Su-hwan cannot get health insurance or proper treatment. As a result, the rheumatic inflammation spreads to his spine, causing all kinds of complications.
Yeong-gyeong, formerly a Korean language teacher, divorced immediately after giving birth to a baby, after a year of marriage. Following the divorce, her ex-husband′s family secretly emigrated to Canada with her baby. Yeong-gyeong became addicted to alcohol after her child was taken from her. Unable to continue teaching students in her alcoholic state, she quit her job.
The two meet after having lost everything. They do not try to stop, persuade, or correct each other′s shortcomings. They simply watch each other in their downward spiral and suffer together.
- Director’s Note / Intention
-
The wounded live upon the ruins. Yeong-gyeong and Su-hwan. They walk the streets, take the subway, and return home, with the fatal daggers hidden in their pockets. They are the people of the Sewol Ferry disaster and the Itaewon tragedy. Will this film, a record of such wounded people living on the ruins, be seen as art?
Yeong-gyeong and Su-hwan in Spring Night are examples of Homo sacer; alive but worthless and abandoned, unfit even for sacrifice to God, a non-existence that must not be permitted into the community. Two such outcasts love each other, but it is a ′miserable love′ that cannot be called pure or noble. This film attempts to depict such a ‘miserable love.’