첫세계The World Before

DIRECTING INTENTION

“If there were no camera in her room, what would a seventeen-year-old girl be doing on her own?”
I’ve always felt that the words “first love” are too small to capture the emotions of that experience. At the instant one first starts to desire another person, what changes most is not the object of that love, but oneself. The self that felt familiar only yesterday turns strange, and the world I knew starts to look a different size. More than the start of love, it is the moment when one world ends, and another begins.
To honestly capture such a time, I felt that the camera shouldn’t step back. If there were no camera in her room, what would a seventeen-year-old girl be doing on her own? That question determined the position of the camera in this film. A girl who studies her body in the mirror, who smells the clothes she has borrowed, who can’t turn her eyes away even though she knows it is shameful. Adolescent girls have long been portrayed as objects to be observed, objects to be protected, or someone’s remembered first love. I wanted to turn that sentence on its head and depict the girl as the subject who is looking, rather than the object being looked at—without hiding how fierce, childish, and even cruel her heart can be. Refusing to prettify it was, I believed, my way of respecting her.
In my previous film Moving On, I looked at a house that was disappearing. This time, I looked at an island that was disappearing, and a summer at seventeen that, once gone by, would never return.
Some leave, some stay, and the season ends. However, anyone who has desired someone else with their whole being, even once, cannot go back to their former self. I believe this point of no return is what growing up means. I hope this film reminds each viewer of the “first world” they once passed through.