An independent short, and three young people

Film, the notes begin, is in modern society a sound cultural pastime that greatly enriches a person’s life. If one watches an independent film after seeing that it is, more than a work made to earn money, a work of high artistic value in which a filmmaker’s own pure passion for expressing art is held, one may, they write, find a meaning and an artistic value hidden more deeply than in a commercial film, and experience a pleasure and a charm that belong to independent film alone.

Gae-cheongchun, they write, is an independent short made in a documentary form, like other films in an indie genre, and completed in the style of a Korean drama. Its subject is sound enough, they say, that all ages may watch it, and through it the filmmaker hands the audience a message found by looking, from new and various angles, at the past and at modern society. It tells, realistically, the stories of three young people — Min-hui, In-sik, and Seung-hui — and, unlike the unrealistic or optimistic plots of other dramas, holds well the various feelings and experiences of ordinary young people living in Korea.

A generation named by a sum of money

The filmmaker’s intent in planning Gae-cheongchun, they write, was to raise the actual situation and a sense of the problem for a generation in Korea whose very name is called by a sum of money, who went to school at the time of the IMF crisis, and who were drilled and pressed to choose a stable job for economic power rather than the work they wanted. The filmmaker, they add, thinks that a generation for whom a civil-service exam at a competition of 200 to 1 seems ordinary is no different at all from the IMF generation. That figure is left as the notes write it, not recast as a later official rate.

Even if one wants a job, they record the filmmaker saying, most posts are irregular and the conditions very poor, and yet people in their twenties are scolded as if they simply lacked dreams, spirit, and passion — and that, the filmmaker says, is the actual look of those in their twenties now. The film, in this account, wanted to treat how the present society has cut off the right of those in their twenties to chase a dream, how shamelessly it shifts the responsibility onto them, how casually it demands their sacrifice, and how listless and tired it makes their youth. In order even to set a foot in society, those in their twenties keep struggling, attempt studies that do not fit their aptitude in order to gather the flashy credentials modern firms ask for, and fold themselves into the frame society requires. If those who work so hard to fit the frame were then successful, or justly rewarded — if society were changing in a right direction — there would be no problem; but if, on the contrary, society is changing temporarily and in a wrong direction, what, the filmmaker asks sharply, becomes in the future of those in their twenties who have given their whole youth, body, and passion to that end?

A basin, a vent, and a viewer’s judgement

The filmmaker already knows well, they write, that the film can neither solve the present problem of youth unemployment nor win the support of all those in their twenties in the country. The reason for planning it and making it on a low budget, they say, was to let those in their twenties who, in a society this harsh and dark, struggle and strive every day not to fall behind, recognise themselves in the film even for a single moment. The filmmaker also expresses a personal wish that those young people who have been comforted and healed might no longer be bound to the strange frame of the present society, and might, with their original confidence, make a new challenge, a new start, a meaningful choice.

Images mentioned earlier — a diver swimming in a basin, ginkgo leaves turning in a vent — are said to be the actual look of young people living in the present; the film, the writer says, gave them time to think about that reality for themselves. The result of that thought is a judgement of their own: Korea’s environment is, in reality, clearly poor for the young to enjoy happiness, to do the work they want, and to use their passion fully — and yet, they think, making oneself a toy plastic diver in a basin is one’s own choice, and the result of that choice. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student viewing of the independent film Gae-cheongchun, and a judgement about a toy diver in a basin.

Last updated: 15 November 2026