Nineteen-year-old high school baseball star Gwangho is the protagonist of NOT OUT. Feeling hurt when he is not chosen in the professional baseball draft, he decides to go to college instead. Yet Gwangho’s decision leads to his high school baseball coach surreptitiously asking for a bribe, and his friends turning their backs on him. The film follows Gwangho, as he makes bad decisions on his bumpy journey of life.

Coming to you is a documentary about gender minorities and their parents. Portraying the lives of four individuals?Hangyeol, a transgender man, and his mother Nabi; Yejoon, who is gay, and his mother Vivian?this film exposes Korean society’s exclusivity against the LGBTQ community while also demonstrating that an alternative relationship is possible between minorities and non-minorities. This documentary is particularly significant in the Republic of Korea today, marked by the tragic death of Staff Sergeant BYUN Heesoo.

Awoke gives a cogent account of the troubles of Koreans with disabilities through the protagonist, Jaegi, who became severely disabled due to a car accident. His heart-rending struggle to be recognized as a “person with severe disability” sheds light on the grave defects in the system. Possibly because the film was created by a crew and a cast of both people with disabilities and without disabilities, the contradictions in the disability rating system and the social landscape within the community of disabled people, where people with disabilities exploit others with disabilities, exposed by this film feel almost too real.

The story of Jeonghee and Minyoung, two girls in the film Kim Min-young of the Report Card, begins in their last year in high school, at the age of 19. Having become inseparable friends through the “Three-line Poetry Club,” the girls each enter on a separate path of life upon graduating from high school. During the summer, Minyoung, now a college student, and Jeonghee, unemployed after losing her part-time job, end up spending a night together in Seoul. With unique sensibilities, this film presents a delicate web of the two girls’ intimate relationships.

First child follows Jeong-ah a married woman with a child and makes a strong case about the difficulty of realizing the seemingly ordinary desires of average Korean women?to marry, have a child, and pursue a career. In the process of trying to achieve her ordinary dreams, Jeong-ah comes to see the nanny as another woman like herself, and this is the decisive factor that differentiates this film from other conventional stories.

Corydoras is a documentary that follows the life of PARK Dongsu, a poet who has a disability. It portrays the inner world of a person who has led a difficult life in a facility for disabled people for 23 years but has now begun a new life in the real world. As he has difficulty using his limbs, PARK writes poetry using his foot, and he admires ornamental corydoras, and the emotions brought on by these scenes are certainly not light. The documentary avoids objectifying the protagonist, which also leaves a deep, lingering impression.

Aloners is a rather timely piece, given the increasing number of people who are doing things alone (termed holojok in Korean) in the COVID pandemic. Rather than simply describing this issue, the film uses this issue as a knife to slice a corner of life in modern Korea and examine it. The frightening and harsh moments of life that the film’s protagonist Jina experiences may ultimately intensify the loneliness and terror of the viewers.

The train passed by does not bring a social issue to the surface, but the film unfolds against the backdrop of an “industrial accident,” which is one of the biggest problems in Korean society. Tracing the pallid footsteps of a woman laborer who has no particular presence in society, this film makes an unmissable accomplishment through extremely simple and concise expressions. The commendable performance of GONG Minjeong, one of the celebrated actors in the Korean independent film industry, is also something that merits viewers’ attention.

Next time, we will bring some introduction of Special Focus: I am Independent, a special section focused on female directors who left a remarkable legacy in the history of independent and art filmmaking.

Please, stay tuned!