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The Grand Prize winner of the 11th Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival with his short Forest (2012), who went on to make an impressive feature debut with INGtoogi: The Battle of Internet Trolls (2013), has returned with his sophomore feature VANISHING TIME: A BOY WHO RETURNED. This new film presents one of the most unique images among the batch of Korean films that have come out this year. 

A lonely little girl, Su-rin (played by SIN Eun-su), is befriended by Sung-min (played by LEE Hyo-je), who unfortunately ends up disappearing by accident. Then one day, Sung-min (this time played by GANG Dong-won) returns in the shape of an adult after spending considerable time in a strange space-time. However, Su-rin is still a little girl and their reunion develops into an odd relationship. A mixture of crime, fantasy and melodrama genres, VANISHING TIME: A BOY WHO RETURNED introduces a universe rarely seen in Korean cinema. 

I was writing this project when a tragic incident took the lives of many young kids. I wondered what I could say about this tragedy, and I found myself wishing for time to stop, and for the kids to come back. It was around that time that I found a photograph of a man and a little girl standing before the waves. This image seemed to fit the story I wanted to tell. What if the two were friends? And what if only one of them came back, as an adult? It’s with these thoughts in mind that this film came about. 

I believe ‘communication’ is the most important thing in a film. I want to tell my stories in a way so that others can relate to them, and in this light I think my films are like personal diaries. I guess that when I’m making a film the things I feel and observe subconsciously seep in. After some time, if I look back at the films I’ll have made before, I think I’ll be able to find in them who I was and the world I was perceiving at that time.

This film has different layers of narration. There is, first, the present where a child psychologist, MIN Kyoung-hee (played by MOON So-ri) listens to the story Su-rin relates. Su-rin’s story then triggers a flashback, and within it Sung-min recalls the world he’s seen. Is there a reason for such a complex narrative structure?

I wanted the audience to take this story as an entry point to Su-rin’s mind. From the beginning, the narration follows Su-rin’s story. But at some point, as you discover the story from MIN Kyoung-hee’s perspective, you start to question whether she’s telling the truth. I used some narration techniques to make it feel like a natural process. Su-rin’s narration in voice-over is employed for the flashback, and when it shifts to the story from the book, Sung-min’s voice-over narration comes in. 

Su-rin has many secrets. Of course, she’s at that age. But the fact she’s an orphan makes her even more secretive. For her, sharing a secret diary with Sung-min seems like the right thing to do, since he’s in the same situation. And to that purpose, I asked the screenwriter to create a secret code for their diary.

Fantasy films often introduce this idea of stopped time, but I think most of them don’t give much thought to the physical depiction of it. I’m not sure whether a world like this actually exists, but my intention was to depict such a world in a plausible way. And this world could well exist only in the imagination of this child, Su-rin, since she has always had an interest for such imaginary worlds. With this in mind, I wanted to create this world as thoughtfully as possible. 

The actual ending is when Su-rin’s stepfather (played by KIM Hee-won) asks Su-rin at the terminal if she saw someone she knows. I wanted to leave it open for the audience to guess what happens next, to make it slightly ambiguous so that you couldn’t tell whether the scene you are looking at is real or not. I wished to address questions like: is Su-rin still in her delusion? What does it mean to get over a trauma? Is it about accepting reality and moving on, or just going on living in a delusional state?

I think I’m at this stage of my life where I believe growing older and becoming an adult means ‘becoming lonely’. In INGtoogi: The Battle of Internet Trolls, I depicted people living on Internet where they are vying for other people’s attention, and a similar sensibility exists in this film as well. Since the issue for me at the moment is to find how I should live my life, I’m sure this personal dilemma will be reflected in whatever my next project will be.