London Korean Film Festival 2020: Moojin Brothers

Scriptures of Wind (2016) is a grim tale of two brothers, a mythical creature and a vanished father, told through stop motion animation. Awakened from the sleep, the two brothers find themselves drudging to preserve sacred objects from the past in a murky dystopian facility. The thrumming sound of machines running and time passing invoke ceaseless fatigue in the aimless progression. The brothers contemplate the possibility to reclaim the presentness from the scrutiny of “the past that hasn’t finished…and the future that is…overflowing.” The only creature that reaches the ending in the story is Myrmecoleon, a mythical creature that dies from an insatiable hunger in Jorge Luis Borge’s writing, Book of Imaginary Beings.

Now, Curiosity about the World (2018) and A Better World (2017) are conceived as part of the Moojin Brothers’ ongoing series, The Trace of the Box. The project aims to deconstruct classical literature and cultural artefacts to re-examine today’s social issues. Now, Curiosity about the World (2018) consists of 80 B&W photographic film slides shot in an underground aquarium and on a rooftop of an infamous high-rise in Seoul. The enlarged sea creatures are superimposed over bird’s eye views of the city and silhouettes of visitors, engendering a haunting clash of the oceanic depth and ether, nature and modernity. Interwoven with extracts from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, these unearthly imageries unfurl, as the artists describe, a new narrative of “a submarine that pierces across the 21st-century metropolis.”

A Better World (2017) follows the process of the ballot counting for the 19th Presidential Election in South Korea. The election took place in 2017 subsequent to a series of Candlelight protests leading to the impeachment of the predecessor. The highly charged atmosphere and restless energy amongst volunteers are palpable in the attentive documentation of the arrival and opening of ballot boxes in the public eye. As the counting begins the footage is coupled with another frame, shot with a thermal imaging camera, unveiling the unseen layer of an already transparent process.