"I’m homeless. I’ve lost my home for several years... But, I still dream about it, even though it fades away day by day"
In 2006, when I returned to Seoul, my hometown, I felt a sense of distance from the image of the city. It was strange because I’ve always dreamt going back to the home from the time when I came here to the U.S. about ten years ago. Since my home wasn’t my home anymore, I got confused and I started to think about the meaning of the home I always dreamt. What is the meaning of home? What are the images of home on my mind? Why do I feel so isolated and live as a stranger? I would like to attempt to reconcile my feelings of alienation that I experienced from both homes: Seoul and San Francisco by making a film about me.
Home is an essay film about my personal journey to my hometown, explored by two fictional characters: the ‘I’ and the Shadow. The main character ‘I’ is the filmmaker’s reflection; he is a wanderer traveling from San Francisco to Seoul to find the home where he used to live. The shadow is the filmmaker’s silhouette who stays in the ‘I’s nostalgic memories from his hometown. However, they belong to the same person. The two characters are distinguished by the conversation between the ‘I’ and the shadow as they speak different languages (‘I’ speaks broken English and Shadow speaks Korean). They recount their stories that they experienced from a different time and place. By facing two different homes and the vanished memories, the ‘I’ gets more confused and the two characters struggle with each other and with their own question about the home that relates to the ’I’s confusion of his identity. At the end of the story, they try to define the true meaning of home. However, they fail. Instead, they start understanding the meaning of life as wanderers living as one in the cycle of the life.
The film will also be developed through combining landscape cinematography with a highly personal voiceover; the story documents my changing relationship with my two hometowns under new sets of circumstances while relating to the larger questions of identity and our always changing relationships to our familial and communal roots.
