Multi-media artist Kelvin Kyung Kun Park looks back to the “heroic age” of heavy industry in 1960s South Korea and the contemporary ruins of those utopian dreams of modernity.
AWARDS: Netpac Award. Berlin International Film Festival/ Busan Film Critics Association Award. Busan IFF/ Authors POV Award. Taiwan IFF
OFFICIAL SELECTIONS: Chicago International Film Festival/ Cine21/ Doclisboa International Film Festival/ Doclisboa International Film Festival
A Dream Of Iron
A love story comes to an end when a woman sets out in search of a shamanic god. Director Kelvin Kyung Kun Park takes the trauma of a spurned lover as the starting point for his own search for a god. He makes several finds across various narrative strands – among whales in the sea, in a shipyard, at a steelworks. All of them are giants of their respective times: vast, sublime, godlike.
Park's imagery also evokes the divine: embers and steel, sparks and fire; people dwarved by huge cogwheels, robbed of their individuality. A brave new world in which workers produce modern industrial goods, even as industry has long since been producing the modern worker. Work is a god we have submitted to. Yet every existence is temporary and fleeting, which applies in equal measure to both relationships and gods.