Breath
A story of people on the border between life and death, such as a person who lets out a deep sigh for survival and a person who sighs in relief before a dead body.
“When the soul leaves the body, where does it go?” Humans keep asking this fundamental question. Human life is like striking a match to burn every beauty and ugliness of life ruthlessly and fiercely. When the fire goes out, the living feel an inexplicably deep and dark emptiness.
An undertaker says that a dead person’s face doesn’t lie. Before performing funerary rituals, the first thing he does is to check on the face. An old lady collects scrap to make a living. After collecting paper scraps in the morning, she takes them to a junk shop and gets paid 1,600 won. She says she has nothing else to do because of her physical condition. To her, living is heavy breathing filled with sighs. She says she lives because she can’t die. Go to the street to collect scraps. Until she is too feeble to walk, she will keep doing her work.
Everything on earth has a beginning and an end. From a personal perspective, each human life seems long. However, from the immense cosmic perspective, it feels extremely short.
I started thinking about this after my mother’s funeral. I thought that the dead soul was as light as soaring up to the distant universe, whereas my living soul was as heavy as falling to a bottomless pit. At least, that is how I felt back then. I also had another thought. Death is the end from this world’s perspective, but it can be a new beginning in the world after death.
This documentary highlights two characters. One person is an undertaker who washes and shrouds corpses for funerals. The other person is an old lady who collects scrap papers for living. Though the two people are crosscutting in the film, their lives are under the same theme after all. Between living and preparing for death, we sense life and death. I want to take a humanistic approach to this issue. I hope this film will help audiences understand death better and ask profound questions about life.
(54999) 2F, JEONJU Cine Complex, 22, Jeonjugaeksa 3-gil, Wansan-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeonbuk-do, Republic of Korea
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(54999) JEONJU Cine Complex, 22, Jeonjugaeksa 3-gil, Wansan-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeonbuk-do, Republic of Korea
T. +82 (0)63 231 3377
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