Again the Wind Blows
KIM Tae-il, JU Ro-mi | 2022 | Documentary | Color | DCP | 103min 36sec (K,E)
Synopsis
Ha Mun-soon, a peddler at Daein Market in Gwangju, and Park Bok-ja, a Chinese dinner, watched the 518 uprising. The 518 uprising, which I saw in the field of life, was left with pain and pride. Sli and Neyap, living as a minority tribe in Cambodia, endure hard work, but they are worried about how long they will be able to save this life. Palestinian women who did not stop their lives in the occupation—Noura and Fatma, who grew old in a refugee camp, watched their children die. How long will this situation last? Will they be able to return home again? No one can say hope. And when the gypsies living in Bosnia-they divided by religion and ethnicity and made enemies of each other, they did not belong anywhere and were treated as public enemies. Ramizawa and Amela calmly talk about the unstable lives of gypsy women who have been subjected to racism for a long time. Meanwhile, the director’s two children have grown from children to young adults in their 20s. They and Sanggu-ne are going while shaking as if they are somehow similar.
–
The opening film of SIFF 2022, our first signal sending to the audience, is Again The Wind Blows by directors Kim Tae-il and Ju Ro-mi. Kim Tae-il started the documentary making with Special Song of Wonjin Factory in 1993, and made five more films at PURN Production, including The Man Who Crosses the Division and 9th April. After becoming independent from the production group, he directed Walking for Life, and his cinematic companion, Ju Ro-mi, has helped him in earnest since Worker Meets Worker. In that process, their vision of a series, A People’s History of the World, starts to embody. After they founded a production, Sanggune, where whole family members participate in, their starting point of the real journey was Gwangju: No Name Stars (2009). The term of the world is to face our problems, and as expected, they recorded another Gwangju in the documentary, setting the principles and direction of A People’s History of the World series. Since then, they recorded and talked about the faces of ordinary people who have experienced modern history wherever they crossed the border, working with minorities in Cambodia’s wealthy farmers’ village: Wellang Trey (2012) and staying in an Israeli-occupied Palestinian refugee camp: All Live, Olive (2016) and in a Gypsy village in Bosnia. Again The Wind Blows is the fourth film of A People’s History of the World. The filming began in Bosnia in 2019 but soon faced difficulties in subsequent production due to COVID-19. Just as the pandemic has given the world a time to rest in reverse, the directors also look back on the decade of time and space of A People’s History of the World series with their families.
KIM Dong-hyun / SIFF 2022 Festival Director