Little Garden

Feature showcase

LEE Mario | 2022 | Documentary | Color | DCP | 86min 13sec (E) World Premiere

SYNOPSIS

Have you ever learned something just for fun? The Little Garden Sisters in Myeongju-dong, famous downtown in Gangneung, have been learning photography with smartphone for the past three years. They decide to go one step further and shoot a movie. Their average age is 75 years, but it is still fun. Their short film My Neighborhood Postman was invited to film festivals and won awards. So now, the new project is documentary filmmaking. However, it is not easy to accept the wrinkled and old self inside the frame, and the older sisters are now unable to move and can no longer film together. Besides, it is difficult to even get together due to COVID-19. Will they be able to complete the documentary?

DIRECTING INTENTION

100 years of life, shock of gray, second part of life. An aging society is an unavoidable reality, in which the elderly occupy most of the population. But we are afraid of aging. How could we live the next decades with a sick body in a poor household? The world only tells you to start a business with insurance for life after retirement: it’s more of a threat than advice. The elderly became a “problem” and lost their value as “existence.”
Now we equate old age with being antiquated, making older people more and more invisible. Not because they don’t exist, but because people don’t look at them as if they don’t exist. The older generation is already experiencing extinction due to the speed of technological social systems before they die biologically. Moreover, the city is filled with the space of processed images, pushing the older generation who have not yet adapted to that space to the outskirts. The elder did not want such a world, but the rapidly changing material civilization betrays their senses and is rapidly overtaking them.
In fact, what the older generation wants, and what they should bask in, is proper “dignity” in their lives. What a non-aged person should discover and admire in an elder is not their maintenance of youth, but their presence and dignity. The beauty in being old, to properly perceive the beauty as the light that attracts attention, and to make it more perceptible, is the task of all of us who age ever since we were born, and who will someday grow old.
For some, being old is perceived as a future that has not yet come, and for others, as a future that will never come. However, the life of an elder also resides in everyone’s life even in this right moment. In fact, the future is already here. Imagining and realizing how to relate to growing old, a future that has not yet arrived and has already arrived, is necessary for everyone that is aging at a rapid pace.

DIRECTOR
LEE Mario

LEE Mario

2001 Rip It Up!
2018 the BLACK
2021 Color of Brass

STAFF

Director LEE Mario
Cinematographer CHO Chanhwi
Editor KIM Hyungnam
Soung Design PYO Yongsoo