Dear you, unrelated is a contemporary project that dares to believe in the potential of fiction. Directors LEE Mi Rang and LEE Jongsu attempt to imaginatively restore the lost ending of The Widow. In The Widow: Rewoven, LEE Mi Rang reimagines the protagonist Shinja making a radically different decision from the original. Her film captures the inner turmoil and determination of a woman once dismissed as an Après-girl, tracing her hesitant yet resolute steps toward a new path. In Bearer of Dawn, LEE Jongsu presents a fictional scenario in which Shinja seeks revenge by finding a blacksmith. A newly added sequence in which she chooses a sword shifts the film’s tone from drama into one infused with the suspense of a thriller.
KIM Taeyang transforms the second short film from his 2024 project Mimang into black-and-white, weaving it together with scenes from The Widow to create a new cinematic piece through montage. SOHN Koo-young, in The Invisible Face(s), explores the imagined relationship between actress KIM Shinjae, whom director PARK Nam-ok admired throughout her life, and LEE Minja, the actual star of The Widow. His work traverses the boundary between potential faces that existed outside the frame and those captured as images within it, fictionalizing the tension between representation and presence.

PARK Nam-ok’s final work, The Widow(1955), guides us toward a site of (im)possibility. This single film left behind by the director serves as a cornerstone for reestablishing the lineage of Korean women filmmakers. Through one female director, we rediscover a new potential within Korean film history. Yet The Widow, a film that has reached us with its ending lost, also presents us with the impossibility of a complete reading. In other words, while PARK Nam-ok and her film The Widow unlocked a long-sealed door as Korea’s first woman film director, we who have stepped through that door still find ourselves lingering in unfamiliar territory. KIM Taeyang, SOHN Koo-young, LEE Mi Rang, and LEE Jongsu—the four directors participating in this project—attempt to imaginatively restore the missing ending of The Widow or explore its production process through fictional reimaginings. In some cases, they intercut scenes from existing films with The Widow, narrowing the temporal and cinematic distance between two fictions. In doing so, they have engaged in a speculative joining of their own work with that of a director from a previous century.

World Premiere