Possible faces
(Eol-gul-deul)

1.Your previous film The Color of Pain (FID 2011) was a documentary which depicted working conditions through the lens of occupational medicine. Here we follow four characters, striving in daily life, aspiring to something else, and the labor conditions are not so far. The origin of this project?
Possible Faces is a sheer fiction but it could be regarded as a documentary film by some of the audience. In my previous films, I talked about someone else’s pain or about the social issues that caused it in some way. Of course, such films are necessary and worthy, but after two feature films, I personally couldn’t stand that kind of work anymore. The fact that no matter how much I tried to relate to the suffering of the subject and to carefully show it in the movie, it was not mine. The discomfort of talking about what is anyhow separate from me has made it impossible to do such work anymore. So, after that, I thought I’d have to make a movie that would turn inward and explore myself. This should not be mistaken for making my own story into a movie.

2. The choice of the characters? The structure of the film interweaves all their trajectories, as a puzzle. How did you elaborate it?
The choice to link the characters to each other? Except for the premise, about Kisun’s impulsive desire to help someone and his failure, the rest was rarely included in the initial planning. Almost all settings and concepts were added along the way during the long process of writing the scenario. For example, Hyunsoo, a delivery man who appears in the second part of the movie, was a character or setting that was not considered in the beginning. Looking back at the time when I was designing a character such as Hyunsoo, logistics and distribution industry – which exponentially grew after the 2000s in Korea – gave me a strong impression. In the world where the popularization of internet is combined with logistics system with remarkable speed, it seemed to me that delivering a product to a customer at home is not simply delivering a product but conveying a message. It also seemed to me that the current capitalistic system defines people’s way of life with a product as mediation. If specific aspects of people’s lives are melted in products in the process of acquisition, enjoyment and signification, it is possible to say that the system or framework provides narration to people’s lives and controls joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure, as in the case of the commercial movies and media. Also I believe that the contents of the control even include desire of altruism for others. This is why this movie describes the existence of a system or framework – symbolically represented as a high-level official of a company in the movie – that watches the process of Kisun’s desire to help others and intervene in other people’s lives and his failure.

3. Sometimes, we feel as if we were not only an audience, but as if we were observing. What led you to this mode of spectatorship?
I am not quite used to making films based on a strong narrative and causal relations that could give rise to emotional identification with audiences. I have created this work with the sense that this film should be far away from such a narrative system even when it became close to it. I could say that some feelings generated between those two different poles would offer an essential view of lives. Meanwhile, Possible Faces has its own premise that there is someone’s gaze all the time that can watch everything in the world. I argue that this gaze is a system itself that governs and controls the world. I consider that those who have that gaze can grasp absurd and obscure conditions of lives. Thus, some concepts of this film that I have mentioned earlier may give rise to two different modes of spectatorship: the audience and the observer.

4. Step by step, we can feel an ominous environment. A kind of soft “hell”?
I contend that this is not a good idea that depicts lives as a complete hell or vice versa. But I am interested in an expression of a “soft hell”. If there was the soft hell, Hyejin can be seen as a person who can endure this hell and have her own rhythm, eventually. Kisun is a person who keeps going around in a circle and does not know what to do.

5. The title?
This film’s initial title was Faces. This is because the film started with an idea that a person is in relation to other people’s lives, forms, or shapes. Such relations of a person with others made me think the way in which he or she faces some fundamental questions about the meaning of lives through his/her own lifecycles. Plus, the reason why I added “possible” in my final title was that I liked the adjective “possible”. I suppose that this word interestingly unfolds a “possible impossibility”. In other words, this adjective could let audiences envision some limitations that paradoxically belong to the word “possible”. I also like an aggressive feeling of this word because it can proclaim that “you are now watching the very limitations of your lives”, as well as declare that “we cannot go further”.