Logline

Fleeing her missing stepfather’s debts, 13-year-old Korean-German girl Lisa and her family escape to eccentric aunt Charlotte’s island house. Death, until now just a joke for Lisa, is soon summoned by Charlotte and fear becomes complete knowledge.

Genre

Coming-of-Age film

 

I always had a desire to portray imperfect characters standing on the edge of the boundary. I maintain my particular focus on incomplete and insecure adolescents on the verge of inclusion in the world. They float like buoys within the normal and abnormal categories defined by society and almost involuntarily have a lot of things to say. However, they are easy to overlook and rarely receive further attention. While working on this project, I aimed to strengthen my sense of theme by asking whether it is the role of society or the individual; if there is an entity that can lead and take care of those who are alienated.

 

Family is the basis on which relationships are built. All characters in this story are looking for ways to cherish each other, and yet they end up failing to reach one another. I want the audience to find out what the string is that ties them up as a family and what this family portrait is in a modern sense. I am seeking to show the form of a family embodied as an ‘Island’ – a fatherless family on summer vacation – to acquire probability in terms of empathy, not in its practicality.

 

A girl wearing sunglasses all the time as if she had declared a break in relations with people; an immature young mum raising kids who have different fathers; an aunt hiding on the island from her family on the mainland; old people enduring meaningless time in a resort while their family is on vacation. I would like to present these sad characters, floating alone on the vast sea and facing their own daily violence, from a feminine perspective and narrative.


 

This is a coming-of-age story that often exudes an eerie atmosphere. Jokes about death flow out casually, catching the attention of the main character in her fantasy-dream sequence projected on a rabbit.

 

As a filmmaker, I have a great interest in introducing an audience to a world in which they will probably have had no previous experience, even if this engenders a strong sense of displacement. I want it to calmly permeate the viewers with questions about what we are, and how our imagination and our state of mind affect us in this messy world. I hope to entice an audience comprised of those who have no fear of unfamiliarity and who look for a film as a medium to broaden their horizons.