‘I',a documentary director, meet the people saying, “You don’t belong to this world.” Sexual minorities become ‘gay followers of North Korea,’ and the bereaved families ‘seditious group’ in this age of hatred. On the journey of searching for marginalized lives, I meet the double life of Lee Muk, a 70 year old Mr. Pants, and am confronted by the truth of people with hatred.

I tried to interweave the mad storm of Chauvinism with expelled lives in this film. When I face people who vent their hatred in public and yell at me “You are ruining this country!”, I feel concern about the effect of this hatred on an individual’s life. What makes a marginalized life livable, when hatred becomes our environment in everyday lives?
By the frame of Chauvinistic hatred, LGBTQ people were branded as “pro-North Korean Gay”, and the grieving families who had lost their children in the tragic sinking of the Sewol ferry were labeled “rebellious force”. Like this, targets of witch-hunting are gradually widened from social minorities to ordinary citizens in South Korea. We can see the current affairs and characters’ lives, which seemed irrelevant at first glance, are connected each other and extended to social meaning through the film. The documentary tries to find the link between us and the world, life of my own and life of the other, and the way to sympathy for the pain of others.

2015 7th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival