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2018



Letters from My Young Father

Family, Agriculture, Ecology, Literature, Middle Age, The Korean Middle Class

JEON Boreum

  • Korea
  • 45min

Synopsis

A husband and wife in their sixties, unfamiliar with farming, struggle day and night to improve their technique to supply crops. Starting from 1988, they moved from apartment to apartment while running a cram school for over 30 years, and raised me. My father left his hometown, and just had to pour his remaining wealth into building three vinyl greenhouses on the outskirts of the city.

Wanting to make a ¡°romantic¡± film about life in a rural area, I didn¡¯t like the ambiguously urbanized scenery of that village. I didn¡¯t even have time to pick up a camera as most small family farms rely on family labor. In front of the camera I made such a great effort to set up, us three farming amateurs make repeated mistakes and even argue with each other.

While trying to go back to Seoul after doubting this basic lifestyle and its lack of romance, I discover a new side to my father through his notebook that had been lying in storage for over 40 years. As I go back and forth between memories, I write a response to an unaddressed letter that he left.

Director

  • JEON Boreum

    Boreum Jeon is studying documentary film-making at the Korea National University of Arts. Jeon directed HOUSE VIDEO (2016), based on images of 'cradles¡¯ and ¡®graves' found in vinyl greenhouses during her time living in a farm village. She gathers fragments of society and families and creates works that archive micro-histories.

Credit