Running Koreans

One of Han Ok-hee’s renowned pieces called The Hole uses the flicker, oblique angles, the cross-cutting of reality and fantasy to express inner entrapment and the desire for liberation. Han Ok-hee’s The Hole, The Rope and Untitled not only experimented with cinematic forms of expression, but also played an important role in the protest against forms of expression in experimental films and the artistic protest against the social suppression and censorship in 1970s Korea. (Art Cinema OFFoff)

In this later work, director Han Okhi returns to her origins as a scholar of Korean poetry to transform the verse of Han Yong-un (1879–1944)—popularly known as Manhae—into a collage of stunning “cinepoems.” Han’s short film features fifteen poems from the eponymous The Silence of Love, the only collection of poetry left to us by the iconic Buddhist, poet, and revolutionary. Since the collection’s publication in 1926, the subject, object, or identity of its central love has remained widely debated. As scholar and translator Francisca Cho discusses, these fluctuations in meaning—a lover? Manhae’s beloved homeland enduring Japanese colonial rule? Buddhist enlightenment?—resound in the malleability of the titular nim, a word that evokes love, lover, beloved, or, as Manhae proposes in the preface to his work, “everything yearned for.” Director Han Okhi takes on the formidable challenge of visualizing the manifold meanings of Manhae’s poetry through her signature experimental style.

It shows Korea’s traditional colors and culture through the use of superimposing. It is an experimental film, which not only tries to show Korean traditional culture through the use of color, but also tries to show the modern history of Korea.

The film contains the despair of an artist’s desire for creation on ruthless censorship, rebel, and anxiety in the mid-70s when it was politically and socially depressed.

shows visual and metaphorical representation using rope as a motif through various rope images and meanings.

One of the major works by South Korean feminist film collective Kaidu Club, this short is a dynamic, idiosyncratic, and mosaic-like portrait of Korean life, culture, and people who dream of a unified North and South.

Han Ok-hee's Three Mirrors fantastically expresses the world of a woman's desires, and the surrealist screen composition, the image of a symbolized candle, the nude female body, and the everyday will to break the suffocating wall of reality are poignantly reflected in the flow of the image.