The foggy early morning scenery is a mesmerizing moment in the film. When the fog subsides, an unimaginable truth unveils. It resembles the many aspects we face in life, like a stratospheric cloud dissipating into space. With different senses, energy, and voices in our lives, we live in a vast and mysterious world. They're things difficult to comprehend. Samnye is such a place. I didn’t dare approach that energy instantly, but I was already writing the script. I had to write it down before it disappeared. Like that, the script went through its lingering stage in the fog, then floated away somewhere out in space. Night Song is the world we ended up in after all the planets lined up, leading many people to meet and dream. Samnye, the Korean title of this film, is a small town next to Jeonju; I cannot forget its vast and cosmic scenery that welcomed me.

While shooting the film in February 2015, I was fully immersed in the winter of that place. The freezing Mangyeong River, the old market, and the cathedral. The intense energy of life and death exuded from the market cannot be described in words. When I revisited the place this year, I noticed a lot had changed. The area we filmed in was probably developed and transformed as soon as the shoot finished. Now that place only remains in the film Night Song like a documented memory.

This is why Samnye is a film, a reality, and a small yet big world that encompasses memories and history. LEE Hyunjung

Virgin Forest (2012), ECHO OF DRAGON (2013)

Strolling Through the Illusion of Space
What could be the almighty control in Night Song? In director Lee Hyunjung's Night Song, various religions are jumbled together, and different gods coexist. Hui-in (Kim Bora) carries both a cross and a talisman around. She visits a church to pray but believes in the words of an old female shaman who tells her about her past life. However, the characters suffer in pain rather than finding comfort in religion. The characters are better off without the strange fusion of gods who enter their mundane lives. Samnye is a small town where everyone knows each other. Here, Hui-in is stuck inside her fate, consumed by the ghost of the past and her predetermined future. When it comes to fate, which god should she pray to?

Meanwhile, Night Song somehow paints the scenery of the town Samnye in a repulsive way. In one scene, some dogs brutally gnaw on the necks of hens. In another, a shocking image of a hen's spilling gut is seen from Seung-woo's (Lee Seonho) perspective. But the most repulsive part is that the women in this small town are split between two extremes. They either need to be invisible or exposed. Just like how a hen's neck gets butchered casually in the hands of men, long hair gets snipped off violently (like how the flesh of the women in this town has been sliced off one by one for hundreds of years). At the heart of all of these narratives is the script Seung-woo writes. Hui-in becomes the primary source of creativity for Seung-woo, who needs to create stories, much like a mother giving birth to inspiration. Seung-woo's mother only appears in the form of a voice over the phone and is seen as a nuisance. The deficiency in Hui-in comes from her mother's absence, and it naturally becomes a mysterious stimulus for Seung-woo. Ultimately, perhaps the woman who survives (or disappears) as an ordinary girl and a muse might have been searching for the almighty without realizing the god-like being she is. In Night Song, fantasies that trigger such delusion are in disarray. LEE Bora

Production LEELALM (raalm9336@gmail.com)
Distribution Indieplug (tax@indieplug.net)
International Sales Mirovision (sales@mirovision.com)