Director

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  Kim Im-man

  Give back Kama’s Right (2011) Since my siblings and I went to public school in Japan, we are unable to speak Korean. My mother did not have an opportunity to attend school either in Jeju or in Japan. She is unable to read or write in Korean or in Japanese. Try as I might, I cannot remember in what language she told stories to me when I was a child. Was it in Japanse? Or was it in Korean? Perhaps I cannot remember perhaps becausee today I think in Japanse.When I was twenty, I became conscious of Korean as my national language(mother’s nation’s language) even though it is a language other than Japanese and foreign to me. The first Korean word I heard other than greetings was my name. It was the first language that went beyond the boundary I unconsciously walled myself in. My name was foreign to me. I realized how my name sounded in my ‘mother’s nation’s language’. I was stupefied by the strange sound reverberated. How did I not know it! Japanese as a language is a mother tongue, but it is not a mother’s nation’s language. The first language I uttered is undoubtedly Japanese. This is certainly not the case for my mother. My mother’s mother tongue is for me a mother’s nation’s language. The entanglement between mother’s language and mother tongue is the boundary between my parents and me. The language is the boundary.When did I start to become conscious of the boundary made by the language? I write thus in Japanese, think in Japanese, speak in Japanese, hear in Japanese, and answer in Japanese. I bought a camera to liberate myself and push myself to go beyond the boundary.Going across the ocean and the generational divide, we translate between the entangled ‘mother tongue’ and the ‘second language.’ Moreover, we need to go across the boundary between “those who expose and those who are exposed” in the words of the great zainichi poet Kim Sijong, to reconcile with one another. I had no choice but to restart filming Memory of Youngwanggung after several failures and suspensions.​