프로그램 노트

Program Note

There is a plant called shiso. With its deep aroma and flavor, it is often used as an accent in Japanese cuisine. It is also a key ingredient in umeboshi, one of Japan's quintessential side dishes. In Korean terms, it occupies a similar position to perilla leaf (kkaennip). But to Koreans, who are fond of kkaennip, shiso can be unfamiliar. And perhaps to Japanese people who love shiso, kkaennip would seem equally foreign. In that sense, shiso—grown in a garden in Korea by a third-generation Zainichi Korean filmmaker who has now lived here for eight years—resembles the director herself.

Although she was born and raised in Japan, the director's parents gave her a Korean name and nationality, and she grew up facing the challenges of a Japanese society that discriminates against Zainichi Koreans. But when she came of age and moved to her grandmother's homeland, Korea, she found that it too was not entirely welcoming. In both Japan and Korea, she remained someone who never fully belonged.

Korea—the country where her grandmother was born, the country her mother had longed to visit her entire life, the country she came to carrying the wounds she received from her mother in childhood. In this land, still an unfamiliar homeland for a Zainichi Korean, the director grows shiso—a plant unfamiliar to Koreans, but one that feels familiar to her, having been born and raised in Japan. As it sprouts and grows through the changing seasons, it mirrors her journey of continual questioning, friction, and tentative reconciliation, as she continues to search for her own identity. The shiso growing in the director’s garden—still an alien on Korean soil—is neither quite like Korea's kkaennip, nor like the shiso she once easily found in Japan. It has become something entirely new. Perhaps even something more distinct, more fragrant. (LEE Youngju)