03/07/2024 - Inju Park’s Reborn with You won the Zlatko Grgić Award, while Yumi Joung’s Circle received a Special Mention in the Short Films Competition

South Korean director Inju Park’s Reborn with You, an original, poetic short film composed of arresting images, distinctive music and sincere, intimate voice-over narration, world-premiered at Animafest Zagreb and won the Zlatko Grgić Award for Best First Film made outside of an educational institution.

Park’s movie has a spectacular pastel-coloured flower background and opens with a woman’s voice-over and a colourful dot-pixel pattern of static with noise on a square frame in the middle of the screen. It’s reminiscent of a TV screen, and after a few seconds, the static is replaced by a strand of long hair. The voice-over tells an intimate story of two sisters, relying on elements such as body and hair to symbolise female power and beauty. With delicate, intriguing sound design and a string-and-woodwind score, the director lays bare emotions to tell a powerful, universal story. When hair on the screen is cut and burnt, the film travels even further beyond its initial visual abstraction or figuration: the pastels shift into colours of the flesh, the voice-over becomes a whisper, and the square frame turns into an eye, to the sound of heavy breathing. Finally, the distinct figure of a woman appears and leads the audience into the realm of the director's imagination and her message.

Park creates stunningly elegant drawings with such an eminently feminine spirit that a powerful social-political commentary is injected into her highly poetic approach. In this sense, her film transcends the personal world of the two sisters at the heart of the story and points the viewer towards the precarious position of women around the world, not least in her home country of South Korea. In the end, the voice-over speaks directly to the audience, inviting them to be “reborn with her”: to understand the constant redefinition of women’s role. Much like the hair which was cut and which will inevitably grow again. 

Another Korean film with a strong painterly quality comes in the form of the acclaimed animator Yumi Joung’s Circle, which world-premiered in this year’s prestigious Berlinale Shorts line-up before taking part in Animafest Zagreb’s Short Competition, where it picked up a Special Mention. Interestingly, her 2013 film Love Games followed the same trajectory from the Berlinale to win the Grand Prize at Animafest in 2014.

Through minimalistic, precise and detailed black-and-white linework, Joung comments on living space as a societal structure. At the beginning, space is undefined: we only see a blank background. Then, a little girl walks slowly into the empty space, picks up a small wooden stick and draws a smooth circle. The still frame is suddenly divided in two: an enclosed space and an open space. A businessman, a businesswoman, a teenager, a student, an elderly woman, a man carrying a large box, a groom and a bride and other figures simply walk into the circle one by one, gradually occupying the space. The characters move or hold up their personal belongings to make room for others, sharing this limited territory. A remarkable contrast is created between the inside and the outside. It’s as if the film is asking the question: are we sharing this common place because we have a need to be close to each other, or is it a societal construction that pushes us into an enclosed environment, both physically and metaphorically?

There is no musical score in the film. Instead, the audience hears wind, bird song and footsteps - signifiers of the real world as opposed to an allegory. So even if the world of the film - which is both limited within the circle and endless in its blank background - appears schematic and symbolic, it also reflects our reality and the universal dimension of human cohabitation.