A UFO traveling through space ends up crash-landing on Earth. People can be seen scurrying around in confusion. Some people decide to leave for someplace else. They have no definite destination. At the airport, I’m holding a plane ticket and someone comes up to me, and offers me KRW 500,000 for the ticket. My throat is dry. I think I’ve finally caught the virus. But I don’t despair. I want to use the virus as an opportunity to turn things around. I guess it’s a form of hope. People, ghosts, viruses—all of them are one. My memory keeps returning back to the words of an Indian director who said they had been observing the movements of the stars and planets over the past few years and noticed some unusual activity starting in December 2019. But I can’t believe it. I can’t even trust myself. Day after day, I am unable to trust. I still can’t lose the fear that I’m trapped in a dream I will never awake from. But I definitely saw a path—a path to hope, warmth, and a new path. Let’s now pull ourselves together, take heart, and seek out that path. Within me, I feel the stirring energy and words of film professionals from nine different countries. They say that as chaotic as things are, we are all still alive: grandmothers, goblins, insects, seas, rivers, light, touch, spiritual energy, encounters, packed theaters, and films. They say we must keep living and moving forward. (excerpt from a dream diary, April 2021) IM Heungsoon

Factory Complex (2014), Things That Do Us Part (2019), Good Light, Good Air (2020)

Still, the Art Goes On
Begun in February 2021, HUG brings together the voices and images-sounds filmed by 68 film industry workers in ten countries around the world during the pandemic. Spoken in multiple languages and depicting diverse cultures, the film focuses on what we had in common during that time: the experience of isolation, the transformation of our social lives, how nature changed with our absence and society’s slowing down, and perhaps most interestingly, the pandemic dreams which reveal our collective fears and insecurities, as well as hopes for the future.

The film focuses on how the pandemic affected film industry workers, the cancellation of films, the introduction of protocols and their enforcement by the military, the empty film festivals. Out of all, the most difficult challenge of all: the physical disconnection from other people. Even though the film centers on those who make films to be projected on screens, HUG returns to the necessity for touch and interaction as critical aspects of filmmaking and as fundamental to the work. And it gives evidence that art continues despite the constant questioning of the importance of art in our lives (reflected, for example, in the rapidity with which economic cuts were applied to the arts across the globe in 2020). 

As long as we are alive, art will continue. But what kind of art do we make in isolation and under military-enforced quarantine? The images in HUG are often distant and cold; we rarely see a tender moment. The people filming observe their surroundings in disbelief and fear in an attempt to leave a record of something they are still living and cannot yet understand. Seen with the distance of time, it also becomes a way for spectators to relive difficult moments and perhaps find a way to attempt to understand the recent past. Libertad GILLS

Production BANDAL Doc. (bandaldoc@gmail.com)
Distribution BANDAL Doc. (bandaldoc@gmail.com)
International Sales Seesaw Pictures (sales@seesaw.com)