Desire

On their second anniversary of marriage, Kang Nam-dae and Jang Young-mi get bored with their routine sex. They visit a motel to re-live their first night and record it on a video camera. Nam-dae spoils the moment by bringing up their mutual friend Jae-guk whom Young-mi had dated previously. After reading Jae-guk's book and realizing he truly loved her, she leaves Nam-dae. Two years later, they meet again and go to see Jae-guk.

Woo-kyeong is a masseuse. His life unfolds on the screen, which is neither to compassion nor peculiarity. He drinks coffee, cooks, makes phone calls, reads books, walks, massages, travels, and views the landscape.

J is a middle-aged man who runs a small computer store in a small city. One Parents' Day in May, he has a peculiar experience..

There's a man aged 93 years. He was born in the "City in the water" and lived there all his 90-plus years. You can see him always sitting under the zelkova tree beside the lake. However, he doesn't look at the beautiful lake. Instead, he looks the opposite side, where hills, walls and roads are. There's a quizzical eye of a man, observing him. One year passes. Seasons change. One day, the old man stares at a certain point in the lake, for the first as well as the last time. That was the location where the house he had been born in was. And he happens to get hospitalized soon afterwards. Then the exploration of the 'City in the water' began based on the old man's story.

On April 28, 1986, two students, twenty-year-old Kim Se-jin and Lee Jae-ho, immolated themselves to death, shouting slogans, “No war, no nuclear weapons, Yankee go home,” “U.S. sign the peace treaty with North Korea,” and “Expel American imperialists.” This took place in the midst of a public demonstration against the forced conscription of students, joined by approximately four hundred students and held at the Sinrim crossroads facing the Seoul National University main gate. The manner of their deaths, the radicalness of their slogans (they were the first overtly anti-American statements to be heard in public since the conclusion of the Korean War) deeply shocked Korean society at the time. Twenty years have since passed. The world has changed.

Kim Gwang-bae is an over-anxious father. He tags along on his son's school MT trips because he worries about his son. In his eyes, his son is still a mere teenager. Gun-ho died but his soul admitted to the department of psychology at the Woosuk University. To Kim Gwang-bae, his son is alive and he wishes that his son wouldn't grow up because when he does, he has to leave his father's arms forever. Kim wants his son to remain with him no matter how much trouble he causes. However on one hand, he tries to let his son go because he knows he can't keep his son with him forever. In the evening, he returns home with his son still at the MT trip. He accepts that his son is a grown-up now. His son can make it on his own but in his heart, his son will always be a young boy.

Poet Jae-ho no longer can write poetry in reality so he belatedly registered on the cyber world. There, he meets Ju-yeon whom Jae-ho knew before but has not thought of for 15 years. Jae-ho came to the cyber world with high hopes but is having a hard time adjusting. Ju-yeon teaches him the laws, the rules, and the living customs of cyber world. In the process, Jae-ho and Ju-yeon go beyond the everyday talk to discover an important memory that has been pushed out. Curiously, it was a file that was drifting in the sea of the cyber world. It was also Jae-ho himself as well as something to be avoided.​

The main character cherishes a crude sea taken with a smartphone. Like an object as an object of fetishism... The sea was the place where I broke up with my lover. That's why the meaning of private secret springs up. He puts the sea on his laptop and looks at it all day. He mistakenly thinks that he is going to Saint Laurent, a place of pure love with his lover (even though the sea is leading him). Who Makes Fiction? Neither you nor me Calculated reason cannot enter the truth of fiction. You have to rely on something else. As if his longing was desperate, he goes into fiction and disappears. with the sea! The world is the same, but he is not. But he is still in reality. Because he didn't move a single step in the corner of the room. Perhaps that was his trick. Borrowing powers other than reason, coloring oneself like an existence longing to become pure... I'm not saying it's absurd, but it's the best...

Escaping the extreme heat, K takes a vacation to a highland retreat, only to be disappointed by a landscape far from what he saw online. To kill time, he takes photos with his smartphone and unexpectedly encounters a mysterious woman in his hotel room. He begins photographing her in earnest, and what began casually turns into deep immersion. Through the lens, the scenery transforms into unfamiliar yet beautiful images, and K becomes captivated by a world he had never truly seen. In a place detached from his expectations, his quiet journey unfolds—gently questioning the boundary between imagination and perception.

In One Fine Spring Day, a Korean melodrama, it wasn't the handsome main characters' love that remained most vividly in my memory, but the scene in which the main male character was recording Jeongsun Arirang, sung by an old couple in a mountainous village. At that time whilst seeing the movie, I asked myself why this sound, not the romance, makes me shudder. I was in my 30s. And, as coincidences become inevitability, I came to know the strange village.