String Pieces
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.
Photosensitivity warning: Contains flashes of light that may trigger seizures for people with visual sensitivities.
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