I spent my childhood in Gangneung, Gangwon Province—a small city where the shadow of division permeated daily life. Witnessing the armed infiltrator incident in the 1990s taught me the meaning of ‘boundaries’ through lived experience. From that day onward, peace became not merely an ideal, but a ‘question of survival’ for me. Returning to Gangwon Province to seek answers, I began studying the theme of ‘peace’ and embarked on a peace field trip along Germany's former border zones with Professor Lee Dong-ki, a historian and peace scholar. Traversing the German border and Gangwon Province's borders, I began to understand the identity of the region where I lived and the ‘border city’ as a frontier of the Cold War and division. How can we transform it into a ‘space in-between’?

Whether one perceives the same space as a boundary or an in-between stems from differences in perception. The German border zone was once a symbol of the Cold War and division, but it has now returned to being an everyday path. However, Korea's borders, especially those in Gangwon Province, still bear witness to an ‘unfinished peace’. As a director from Gangwon Province, I seek to capture a journey of reflection that transcends physical boundaries into the ‘in-between’—where spaces of hostility transform into spaces of connection. Observing the gap between ‘memory and present, war and daily life, division and peace’ within the temporal disparity of these two borders, I aim to convey this transition. The story of the ‘individual’ standing on the borderline returns as the ‘memory of the community’.

World Premiere