Korean Review on a Bastard Child
In Korea, a documentary used to be considered as a part of journalism, and it is accepted as having a distance from arts, personal tastes, or imaginations. However, an artist who paints pictures has used the animation to portray his grandmother’s life. It is not just a technical reason to replace something that cannot be photo- graphed or reproduced. The film is a montage of images, and animated images have been adopted as a way of articulating imagination and personal consciousness in the documentary. The realization that the world changes so quickly also could be seen in the conditions of women’s lives. It was hard to raise a child without being married in Sweden about 100 years ago, hard enough to think about crack- ing the frozen lake and jumping in to finish the life. The child, who grew up watching her mother in pain, became the pioneer for women’s rights. And that child was the director’s grandmother. The director paints pictures of his grandmother’s child- hood memories. His grandmother does not just talk about the pain. She remembers her mother eating a sandwich on a train and a bird-shaped flute made by her mother’s lover. Life is a mixture of good and bad. And there is a high power to break such good things. The director emphasizes it by repeating the image of a deer being harshly bitten by the dozens of hounds. The image of a deer surrounded by many passive on- lookers and violent attackers overlaps with the image of the mother and daughter. However, the film ends with the image of his grandmother swimming back from the deep water, like her name Hervor (meaning ‘struggle’), the last scene of this dreamy image is more impressive than any real images.
