Three women of different generations head to Yongwangdan, a small Buddhist shrine at Gijang Beach in Busan. The grandmother Myung-ja insists on releasing a turtle that her husband raised during his lifetime to build up virtues. Despite of her daughter Hae-joo’s dissuasion for the ritual, she believes that it is the only way to get rid of her nightmares since her husband’s sudden death from the pandemic. For her, the turtle seems to be the reincarnation of her troubled husband. However, as they climb the rocky path, the grandmother stops because of her pee with incontinence. Now the turtle is left to the granddaughter Su-jeong, who goes up to the shrine alone.

In the process of industrialization in Korea, the story of female workers has been mainly concentrated in the metropolitan area. However, I learned that the shoe industry in Busan was achieved by thousands of female workers who did not head for the metropolitan area. I wanted to tell a story of women based on a Buddhist worldview that intersects fiction and facts, this world and afterlife, nature and nightmares, set in the Yongwangdan, the only maritime shrine in Korea. Through the newly discovered rare archive footage, I tried to imagine an allegorical story that looked back on the history written by patriarchal fathers, and asked about how to deal with their wrong doings.

World Premiere