바나나 얼음 땡Banana Freeze Tag! : The Hundredth Day Party

DIRECTING INTENTION

What does a child's first society look like? Entering elementary school is the moment a child begins to form relationships outside the family. In South Korea, where "entrance exams for four-year-olds" and "med-school prep for seven-year-olds" no longer sound strange, children's afternoons are filled with cram schools and competition from an early age. This film follows seven first graders who spend their afternoons at Dotori After-School Program, a cooperative run by local families. Their afternoons are for folding towels, washing bowls, fighting, crying, and making up. These small things become the children's first practice in living with others. In freeze tag, a frozen child is set free by a friend's hand. In the same way, the children find their place among people who wait for them and accept them. The first graders give the camera a nickname, Sundubu ("soft tofu"), and make it their friend. The camera runs and plays alongside them at their eye level. Layered over the first graders' days are the many children who have grown up in this community, and our own ties to it: for more than ten years, we have shared our lives here as fellow parents and neighbors.
On their 100th day of school, the older children hold an anniversary party to celebrate the first hundred days the first graders have safely spent in their first society beyond the family. A year later, now second graders themselves, the children prepare the party for the younger ones. Growing up may be less about becoming good at something on your own, and more about being able to pass on what you were given.
Following The Teachers: Pink, Nature Trail, Ridge Between Rice Paddies, Plum (I Am a Village After-School Teacher) and The Rule Breaker, Banana Freeze Tag!, the final film in our Care Trilogy, is a question the children of Dotori Village After-School pose to our times, and a call to protect the time we are losing without even realizing it. In a society where competition begins too early, what do we truly need in order to live together? The film is full of children's energy from beginning to end. Its constant, boisterous energy will invite frozen adults into a game of freeze tag.