Nam A-rum

An elderly man brings home a broken fan and wrestles with it for hours until the blades spin again. He has put the blades on backward, but the wind is still cool. "My illness is the same as this fan." Suffering from hearing loss and mental disability from a fall, he collects discarded objects in a small patch of woods in the heart of Haeundae and builds a world of his own. His granddaughter, who enrolled at art college only to lose the desire to draw, begins instead to capture her grandfather’s world with her camera. His world is full of useless things and incomprehensible happenings, but she willingly joins him on his outings.

Nabi, a veteran fire officer, accepts the coming out from her child Hangyeol, “I want to remove my breasts.” Meanwhile, Vivian, a flight crew, receives a letter from her son Yejoon, “Mom, I’m gay.” Hangyeol and Yejoon confide in their struggles even before the two mothers understand their reality.

In her first feature-length documentary, filmmaker Nam Arum turns her camera on her parents, two members of South Korea’s 386 Generation. The political activism of this generation came to a head in June 1987 with major protests that forced the authoritarian government to hold universal suffrage elections and implement key democratic reforms. Over 35 years later, the filmmaker reflects on the state of this democracy through a warm-hearted family portrait set against the backdrop of the country’s recent history. Using a personal and intimate cinematic style, Arum examines her father's adherence to conventionality as a high-ranking civil servant and her mother's fervent enthusiasm as a feminist activist. In the midst of these two contrasting dynamics, Arum seeks to discover her own role and how she can contribute to social change.

Since my mother was working at the women's rights group, the field of feminism movement was my playground. I grew up as a little feminist who cut her hair short and refused to wear skirts. However, as I got older I experienced things that made me run away from feminism. Eventually, I decided to be a princess rather than a feminist, and started to stick to pink as a survival strategy. Can a person like me can be a feminist again?