Among everything obscure in an image, there is always the camera. The film reconstructs and radicalizes the ways to see and interpret archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image.

This Isn’t What It Appears reexamines and reinterprets photographs of Korean women from the 1950s and 60s taken by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. While these photos feature Korean women performing in the US military bases in South Korea on various occasions, detailed information about the women and the photographers is absent. The film juxtaposes such unfilled gaps in history with the hierarchy between the subject and the photographer to highlight what has been excluded from the frame due to the inevitable subjectivity of the camera. The Super-8 film of 20-minute-runtime features an introspective process that struggles to capture the frame, the behind, and the shadow of the photographs.

2022 DMZ International Documentary Film Festival