An indie film that did not leave the theatre in a month

Almost every independent film, the opening says, disappears without a sound. A low-budget picture has usually left the theatre within a month. Old Partner, which opened on 15 January, did not. By 15 February 2009 a Kookmin Ilbo piece was already writing about the reflection it invited; a Busan Ilbo piece dated 31 March 2009 set it in a longer line of documentaries. It is credited with three million viewers and with stepping outside the habit of treating an independent film as something that cannot draw a crowd. Those figures are left with that account.

Lee Chung-ryeol’s documentary follows an eighty-year-old farmer who had kept his land all his life, and an old ox that had worked beside him for decades, in the deep mountains of Bonghwa, in North Gyeongsang. In one place the film is introduced as thirty years together; in others it is nearly forty, and of a forty-year friendship. The English title is Old Partner. A wonang is the bell hung on an ox’s neck. The poster shows the grandfather’s two hands around that bell, against a field of dandelions, and a rough line of thanks: thank you, thank you, truly, thank you.

The elderly couple treat the ageing ox as if it were kin. The farmer, who was seventy-nine when the film was shot, had spent more than half his life with it, and can tell its health from its cry alone. He will not spray pesticide, in case the ox eats the grass, and he puts a muzzle on it for the same reason. Even in rain or illness he goes out, with a body that is no longer sound, to cut fodder. When the ox dies, they bury it in a sunny place, and they grieve. The film does not praise or despair of the countryside as it is today. It is described as showing a life without polish, and as reminding people used to digital speed of the value in an ox’s pace, and of a tie that cannot be counted in money.

How a small documentary was shown, and how it was talked about

The film had been planned as a television documentary. In Korea, human-interest work such as MBC’s Love series or KBS’s Human Theater is treated as the kind that reaches people most readily; EBS is cited for nature films that take long labour, such as Dinosaurs of the Korean Peninsula, and KBS’s six-part Noodle Road is named as a planning success. Political and social documentaries are called rare; Kim Dong-won’s Repatriation, in 2004, about unconverted long-term prisoners after their release, is almost the only one given. A short line of earlier documentaries is also set down: lantern-and-slide work before the Lumière brothers showed film to a paying crowd in 1895; The Arab Knife-Grinder in 1897; A Sunday Morning in Mexico in 1898; an Ethiopian wedding in 1908; Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North in 1922; and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in 1929, after he had wanted, in the phrase used here, a life caught unawares. Old Partner is placed in that longer wish to listen to a life as it is, rather than to a story invented for the screen.

There is no narration. The voices of the village are left as they are, and the inland North Gyeongsang dialect is given in subtitles. A Kookmin Ilbo piece dated 15 February 2009 notes that the film holds back the political excess, experiment, and subjective reading often associated with independent work. A cart belonging to the old man is described passing, without fuss, through a protest against the Korea–United States free trade agreement.

The production cost is given as 100 million won. Publicity money was 40 million won from the Korean Film Council and a loan taken by the producer, so a large campaign was impossible: a little advertising in film magazines and free papers, and small items that might travel by word of mouth. Jo Gye-yeong, who led marketing at Indistory, is quoted as saying the team had been torn between laughter and tears; with television variety and the success of Speed Scandal having already filled a taste for laughs, they made a trailer in a ‘moved-to-tears’ version. A five-minute clip, also in that vein, on KBS’s Movies Are Good stood in for a trailer. Handkerchiefs given out at the Busan Film Festival, before release, did little; the same cue worked better with people who came to the theatres. There was an online event to name the ox. Thirty-seven-year-old viewers, born in a Year of the Ox, were thought to be at an age of thinking about their parents.

Previews for some two thousand people were held, more than for most independent films. The largest credit is given to the Seoul Metro preview, with seven hundred people: for little more than a hall fee, a screening was held and four or five posters went up for two weeks in stations on lines 1 to 4. The series usually chose large commercial pictures; citizens had been complaining that a programme for Seoul residents showed only those, and Old Partner, with its Year of the Ox and its rural life, was let in. When the audience passed 50,000, news programmes began to mention it; when it passed 100,000, interviews arrived in a rush. Participation in the Sundance Film Festival became another talking point, as a sign of international notice. Those figures are left with the 2009 pieces. The producer, Go Yeong-jae, had earlier overseen Our School, then the highest-grossing documentary, and had learned, from Repatriation, how much word of mouth matters. He is quoted as saying that a producer should not be treated as a director’s subordinate, and that trust between the two can make a better film. At that time he was also preparing Farmers’ Song, with a different way of showing it in mind.

A bell, a grandmother’s joke, and a friendship people say they want

The personal viewing begins with a dictionary. The author had not known what a wonang was, and had passed the film by, even while the papers kept talking about it, until an assignment to write about a film brought it back. The picture opens with the sound of the bell. There are no quiet ballads or classical or New Age cues of the kind that often underline a moving film; a few folk songs from an old radio, and the clear bell, are almost all the music there is. That sound is compared to a wind chime, grave and a little desolate.

The opening already shows the time after the ox has died, so a viewer watches the rest with that death in mind. The grandmother’s complaints, which start with a sigh and end with ‘this lot of mine,’ her shout of ‘Smile!’ when the grandfather, his face set, is having a memorial photograph taken, and her line that the radio is junk, the ox is junk, it is all junk, are set beside his stubbornness and the ox at work, and that arrangement is what draws a laugh. The ox died the following winter. The grandfather cuts the nose-ring and says, quietly, that it should go to a good place. Old names for a close friendship are reached for — Boya and Zhong Ziqi, who knew each other’s playing; the orchid-and-iris tie people say they want and few achieve — and then the viewing comes back to a simpler image: the old man holding the dead ox’s bell. The author, who had only ever pictured an ox’s eye from a dissection, finds the old animal’s eye simple and beautiful, and would now tell someone to see Old Partner before repeating the compliment. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Lee Chung-ryeol (dir.), Old Partner. Kookmin Ilbo, 15 February 2009, on the film’s reflective message; Busan Ilbo, 31 March 2009, on Old Partner and documentary; Cine21 analysis of the film’s run (mag_id=55080).
2. Kim Dong-won (dir.), Repatriation (2004); Our School, produced by Go Yeong-jae before Old Partner.

Last updated: 14 November 2026