New hypes regularly make teenagers all over the world queue up for new sneakers. They have no idea that the women who make them can’t afford them. “I want to wear Nike shoes, too”, was the slogan when they started their struggle in the 1980s. The video artist Im Heung-soon, whose mother worked in a textile factory, makes them visible: an army of worker ants who built the foundations of South Korea’s meteoric rise to economic power and who paid for this with their health and often their lives. Im Heung-soon draws a connection to today’s globalised consumer worlds where it’s the women again who keep things going in textile factories, the electronics industry, super markets, call centres or the service industry, who earn a pittance and always wear a friendly smile. He interweaves this ruthless and sober chronicle of exploitation, told in interviews, with surrealist experimental performances which individualise the pain of those who are usually seen as a mass or as human capital first and foremost.

Im Heung-soon won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennial for his moving work which oscillates between art and documentation. It would be even better to spare a thought for the women from “Factory Complex” before the next mobile phone is purchased. And to question the purchase in the first place.

Grit Lemke

As a new-born child the girl was abandoned by her teenage mother. She finds affection at the orphanage and with a family. But the fear of being abandoned again stays with her, crawling up inside her like an insect, dominating her thoughts and her whole life. When her foster mother has a child of her own, it’s getting harder to keep these feelings under control.

Annegret Richter

“Sometimes I think I’m only the tool and poetry is the real protagonist.” Each of the five persons in this film has a special relationship with poetry. To them, poems are the elixir of life, a cure, an escape from the rush of everyday life. None of them were made happy by the consumer society – their dreams were not about money, careers or recognition. They wanted a life without pressures and fears. Poetry has accompanied them on their way to a different kind of existence, gave them strength when their courage failed. The remarkable calm and serenity reflected in their faces says it all: their decisions were right.

In their conversations, Soojung Lee gives her protagonists enough space to get to the core of the subject. In pleasantly associative images the film outlines the intersections where their paths cross. Even if their problems aren’t the same, their irritations have similar roots. The conformist and well-adapted life in the rat race of a society geared towards performance and consumption has its victims. Especially among those who don’t want to fit their souls into pre-determined pigeon-holes. A quiet and delicate film that gives a stage to those who are resolved to follow a different kind of clock.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

---

Nominated for Healthy Workplaces Film Award