We started filming on January 1, 2016, in Goseong, where it rarely snows. Located in South Gyeongsang Province, Goseong is where I was born and raised, and it’s a setting filled with experiences reflected in the script. Filming in my hometown was a warm and giddy experience at first, but as we traveled from location to location, I kept rediscovering memories I'd hidden in my mind. It was the bizarre feeling that a past I'd been trying to conceal my whole life was now coming back to me—and those memories returned even more powerfully when I saw them reenacted through the actors' performances.

I was experiencing a constant whirlwind of emotions, but I couldn’t let that show. I was fixated on conveying those raw emotions to the actors. But the ghosts of memory that haunted Goseong kept speaking to me; they still lingered in those places, wearing outfits of guilt and shame. As the camera captured the locations and the characters filled the screen, the ghosts leaped into action as though they’d been lying in wait. I wrestled with capturing those feelings in the frame, but the more ambitious I got about filming, the more obstacles I ran into. The moment I let go of those ambitions and frankly confronted the past, I felt more at peace. An atmosphere like the truth had started making its way onto the screen.

We had only the ending scene left—the only scene where snow flurries—and we moved between locations. The sky had been clear throughout filming, but now a lot of snow started coming down. It showed no signs of letting up, and I spent the whole afternoon praying for it to stop. We’d already made plans to use prop snow and computer graphics on our source footage of the sky. Finally, the snow suddenly stopped when we were about to give up on shooting the ending scene. The special effects team got all their equipment and started shooting this styrofoam snow into the sky. I thought of how amazing it was that this was the only artificial thing we captured onscreen while shooting A Stray Goat. As I looked up at the sky, I started to cry. Seeing the darkened sky filled with this fake white snow, I found it all so incongruous and confusing. As I was thinking of the lack of clear boundaries between the true and the fake, I suddenly could feel all the illusions and contradictions I'd been deceiving myself over the years and how they now seemed like that prop snow.

After we finished shooting the ending scene, it felt like I'd shaken off many of those phantom memories that followed me. It may be that the filming of A Stray Goat was the truth that the past I finally summoned the courage to tell the present me. CHO Jaemin

Sign (2012), Bubble Art (2013)

Following the footprints of feeling
If seen as a metaphor for the sadness that has been coldly scattered, A Stray Goat is a wintry film that will not melt even with the sun's warmth. Minsik (Jinyoung), a high school student who has transferred to Korea's southern provinces where snow rarely falls, strives to fit in with the crude culture of the male students there so as not to be ostracized at his new school. The film does not draw a clear line between victimhood and victimization and traces the feelings of watching from the periphery, hesitating, and experiencing compassion.

By the end of the film, it is not clear whether Minsik was an abuser or a victim of abuse at his previous school or whether the father of Yeju (Ji Woo), a girl subjected to overt abuse at school, is really the culprit behind the death of a child in the provinces. The film placidly observes the particulars of everyday violence involving young students abandoned in an environment of practical and psychological ambiguity. They may be violent because of cowardice, but we also see signs of compassion for the vulnerable. Minsik looks after a small black goat that has lost its way and gradually opens his heart to the quiet Yeju.

The name of Goseong County literally means solid fortress. It has an old and robust fortress, which offers a view of the expanse of the sea. It also provides an occasional shelter for Minsik, Yeju, and the black goat. But just as the fortress is now a ruin, their relationship is not entirely robust. The adults of their small provincial county are unsympathetic to their plight, and the aching desire to protect the small goat is ruthlessly crushed. Battered physically and mentally, Yeju finally plunges her foot into a frigid pool of water. Her black footprint embeds a mark on everyone that will never be erased.

While the film may seem to share commonalities with others about violence in schools, A Stray Goat is more about the transformations of deeper emotions than it is about our reality. Director Cho Jaemin wrote the script under the guidance of director Lee Chang-dong at the Korea National University of Arts School of Film, TV & Multimedia. He eventually completed it after joining the inaugural class of the MYUNG FILMS LAB. The symbols naturally integrated throughout the film—the black puddle, the flurries of snow, and the black goat in its white robe—amplify the emotions as they resonate with changes in the weather. The fate that awaits below the dark earth coldly plunges the viewer's heart into the sorrow that scatters like white snow flurries. SONG Hyo Joung 

Production MYUNG FILMS LAB (mfl@myungfilm.org)
Distribution Little Big Pictures (sales@little-big.co.kr)
International Sales FINECUT (cineinfo@finecut.co.kr)