ACF
Asian Cinema Fund
Post-Production Fund
2024 Post-Production Fund
LIST I Am Love
| Category | Korean Project |
|---|---|
| Project | I Am Love |
| Director | BAEK Seungbin |
| Country | Korea |
| Director's Profile | Baek Seungbin majored in English literature at university and graduated from the Korean Academy of Film Arts. He began to receive critical attention for short film, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (2007), inspired by John Fowles’ novel. His first feature, Members of the Funeral (2008), was invited to Busan International Film Festival 2008, Berlin International Film Festival 2009, and won the APSA NETPAC Development Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2009. He later followed up with I Have a Date with Spring (2018), invited to the Tiger Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2018; and So Long, See You Tomorrow (2021), which screened as opening film at Seoul International Pride Film Festival 2021. His fourth feature project, I Am Love (2024), won the ‘Pitch & Catch’ award at Seoul International Women′s Film Festival 2023. |
- Synopsis
- Oh Sa-rang, a pharmacy assistant in her late 30s, is obsessed with regular customer, Chol-su, who stops by her pharmacy every lunchtime to buy digest-aid and an energy drink. She knows that Chol-su only comes to the pharmacy every day to share a silly, little chat with the pretty and charming pharmacist, Jong-hee, who is also Sa-rang’s cousin. Jong-hee receives small gifts every day from Chol-su; different kinds of snacks, such as chocolates, fruit baskets, and health drinks. Jong-hee is always effusively grateful for them, but then doesn’t touch them and gives them all to Sa-rang. Jong-hee hates Chol-su; a fat and tactless man. He has no idea that all his gifts are piling up in a corner of Sa-rang’s room. On the day Chol-su must say a heartfelt farewell to Jong-hee, Sa-rang decides to drug Chol-su and take him to her own secret place.
- Director’s Note / Intention
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I tried to express the feeling of love from the perspective of a disease and its clinical manifestation. But I hope this film will not resemble a laboratory study, using the method of looking through the cold, heartless lens of a CT scan. Rather I want it to be an intimate, cinematic depiction, as if described through the pen of the romantic poets such as John Keats or Lord Byron.
By conducting a romantic autopsy on ‘Love’, the emotion favored most among the tons of human feelings that drive people crazy, I want the audience ultimately to discover ‘Empathy’ which will spread everywhere.