At various points of the night they performed sleep to assure themselves that any affliction to their somnolence was not due to one another. In the morning they both said they slept well and separated to different rooms to prepare for a day mostly spent in bookstores and charity shops. They sat silently at a cafe, watched as the rain collect on umbrellas and polish the streets.
They found a village nestled in the heart of the #city. There they traced the River Leith towards the port up north but stopped short of going towards the edge, and so they imagined the river flow out to the Firth of Forth. Through the man-made fog at Sneaky Pete’s later in the evening, the haunting voice of Black Belt Eagle Scout sang the river to them: “But I can’t see you/But I can feel/Your energy.”
Kwak Eun-mi’s debut film, A Tour Guide (믿을 수 있는 사람), spotlights the life of a North Korean defector living in South Korea (Han-young, played by the effervescent Lee Seol), who works as a tour guide for Chinese tourists, introducing famous South Korean landmarks she is alienated from. Han-young may look like a South Korean but her accent and status as a refugee elicit constant consternation and suspicion and she struggles to make a home out of a foreign land. The limbo facing a refugee is captured superbly by Eun-mi as the audience are shown, in a slice-of-life manner, Han-young’s life in South Korea, three years of struggles punctuated with some happy moments.
During the Q&A session after the movie, Lee Seol spoke briefly about her role as Desdemonda in Shakespeare’s Othello. It brought to my mind Desdemonda’s quote from Act 4 Scene 2: “His unkindness may defeat my life/But never taint my love.” It is these lines I paired with Han-young’s face of defiance in the movie’s ending shot, just as she is about to leave South Korea for an unknown destination. The dearth of kindness dealt to Han-young is reciprocated in equal measure, her unwavering resolve to forge a home for herself. It matters not where Han-young goes in the end, whether back to North Korea to see her mom, or to Germany to see her best friend, Jung-mi (played by the equally impressive Kyung-Hwa Oh), a fellow North Korean defector, or to somewhere else entirely. Especially for a migrant leading a precarious existence, home is not a single destination but a journey.
Chan Wai Charles Wong 