\n<\/p>\n
\n\tA unified post-war Korea where the sea and the sky are enveloped in poignant red is the main stage of Syeyoung Park\u2019s\u00a0\u201cThe Fin,\u201d\u00a0his follow-up to debut \u201cThe Fifth Thoracic Vertebra\u201d which world premieres at Switzerland\u2019s Locarno Festival in the section Filmmakers of the Present.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Coproduction Office handles world sales on a South Korea (Seesaw Pictures) and German (Essential Produktion) co-production, supported by Qatar\u2019s Doha Film Institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter three years of post-production, the film envisions an apocalyptic world that hosts the Omegas, a mutated group of outcasts exploited as cheap labor by the government faction, the Omega Labor Force, who are entrusted with hunting them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn his imagining of a dystopia, Syeyoung Park attempts to avoid representing his country as it currently is. \u201cI\u00a0do not like how Korea looks right now because there\u2019s a Starbucks, McDonald\u2019s, 7-Eleven, every one minute you walk. So it\u2019s polluted with so many ugly, corporate images,\u201d the filmmaker told\u00a0Variety<\/em>\u00a0at Museo Casorela in the heart of Locarno. The world in \u201cThe Fin\u201d is a space plucked out time \u201cno cars, no cell phones, and no sort of capitalistic logos invading the screen\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA fishing pond inside an abandoned building\u00a0 is a colorful, kaleidoscopic oasis where the conflict between both groups is paused, accompanied by euphoric melodies. \u201cThere\u2019s no story progression here, you just chill.\u201d Visually, this space is a sharp contrast to the ecologically depleted scenarios surrounding it. \u201cIn the ocean, there\u2019s red. In the city, there\u2019s just black and white. And it\u2019s very monotone. But in the fishing store, what I wanted was to do the complete opposite where I introduced every color possible in one space.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tOur species has polluted the planet, so that grey clouds of smoke invade many urban landscapes. Syeyoung Park, who also shot the film himself, on other hand, achieves a vision full of radiant colors and textures. For him, this is a way of \u201cpolluting the screen with textures. There\u2019s no clean image. The actual mechanism of making the film resulted in a lot of digital noise on screen and a lot of different textures everywhere that are constantly moving around.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tPark cites Harmony Korine \u201cJulien Donkey-Boy\u201das a reference point for this digital innovation. That film, he said, \u201cwas shot with DV tape. Then they\u00a0blew it up to 16 mm film and then 35 mm so there\u2019s all these different sorts of pollution on the screen and that was the beauty of the film.\u201d Similarly to the American director, Park decided to \u201cexpand the texture to give the sense of being a ghost or a spiritual element to the film.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe Fin\u201d is very much concerned with a specter that still hunts the whole humankind: that of COVID-19. At that time, Park recalls \u201ceveryone had masks, we were two meters away from each other. When you took off your mask during the pandemic, it made everyone, even your closest friends and family, foreigners to each other and there was a fear of contamination through speaking or touching.\u201d The film evokes this sensation not only by the division between humans and Omegas but also in the way in which relationships are depicted. Characters are distant and seeking out connections. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn the midst of this dystopia, a sense of optimism arises from questioning the dividing lines that separate social groups. \u201cI hope that people get the feeling that maybe what they see around them is not true. So they actively, not passively, reconsider what actually constitutes an Omega or not, which leads to how do we decide who is an Omega and who is not? How do we decide who is a human or not? And if anybody in the audience reaches that point of questioning what divides Omega and\u00a0human, I think that the film has succeeded. It\u2019s about stating two things and then showing that the statements are very volatile,\u201d he says in an invitation to avoid the conformism we are constantly forced to fall into.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A unified post-war Korea where the sea and the sky are enveloped in poignant red is the main stage of Syeyoung Park\u2019s\u00a0\u201cThe Fin,\u201d\u00a0his follow-up to debut \u201cThe Fifth Thoracic Vertebra\u201d which world premieres at Switzerland\u2019s Locarno Festival in the section Filmmakers of the Present.\u00a0 The Coproduction Office handles world sales on a South Korea (Seesaw<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1540,1171,8765,2206,121,858,8763,8764],"class_list":{"0":"post-15176","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-festival","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-fin","11":"tag-locarno","12":"tag-park","13":"tag-playing","14":"tag-syeyoung","15":"tag-unpacks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}