String Pieces

Filmstill string pieces

String Pieces

Garak
Vatae Kimlee
International Competition Documentary Film 2025
Documentary Film
South Korea
2024
28 minutes
Korean
Subtitles: 
English

A student in Incheon leads a solitary existence, sending off essays late at night, leaving her cramped apartment to smoke out on the street, scrolling through old ads on the internet. When she clicks on an MPEG file that happens to be on her USB stick, a conversation with her grandparents blares forth, recounting their life in the same neighbourhood where she now lives. Once released, their voices won’t stay quiet, creeping into her daily routine and her dreams. As they talk of prejudice against North Korean refugees, taking cardboard from the US military base to build a makeshift house overnight or making malt taffy to earn a living, their endeavours come to life in stop-motion sequences that appear, like them, to belong to a different era. But this is just one of many different visual ideas and animation techniques on display, including hand-drawn sequences of various kinds, scanned-in images that recreate the neighbourhood in cannily imperfect 3D, real photographs and live-action scenes that even show the people behind the voices at one point. History never stays silent; here we see all its overlapping layers.

James Lattimer

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Vatae Kimlee
Script
Vatae Kimlee
Cinematographer
Junyong Lee, Eunsol Cho
Editor
Vatae Kimlee
Producer
Saehoon Yoon
Sound
Luuk Bakkum, Tongxin Guo
Sound Design
Tongxin Guo
Animation
Vatae Kimlee
Nominated for: Silver Dove
Winner of: Silver Dove Short Film (International Competition Documentary Film)