진짜 크리스마스A Real Christmas

DIRECTING INTENTION

A Real Christmas (2025) traces the life of Lee Kyung-soo, a Korean War orphan adopted by a U.S. Navy officer in the aftermath of the war. Drawing from fragments scattered across newspapers, magazines, and photographs, the film imagines the perspective of a child whose story was never fully preserved in the historical record.
Borrowing the audiovisual language of American popular animation from the 1950s and 1960s, the film reconstructs the bright, optimistic imagery through which the media of the period shaped and circulated its narratives. Newspaper texts and photographs are transformed into abstract animation through collage, moving again in repetitive rhythms. The playful surface, however, both conceals and reveals the silences, absences, and the instability of narratives constructed within a specific political context.
Rather than restoring archival materials, the film reactivates the visual language of the era in which they were produced. By returning to their original media aesthetics, the film exposes the absence and loss embedded beneath the archive's surface, while exploring animation as another mode of excavation—one that brings forgotten lives back into motion.