A unified post-war Korea where the sea and the sky are enveloped in poignant red is the main stage of Syeyoung Park’s “The Fin,” his follow-up to debut “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” which world premieres at Switzerland’s Locarno Festival in the section Filmmakers of the Present.
The Coproduction Office handles world sales on a South Korea (Seesaw Pictures) and German (Essential Produktion) co-production, supported by Qatar’s Doha Film Institute.
After 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.
In his imagining of a dystopia, Syeyoung Park attempts to avoid representing his country as it currently is. “I do not like how Korea looks right now because there’s a Starbucks, McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, every one minute you walk. So it’s polluted with so many ugly, corporate images,” the filmmaker told Variety at Museo Casorela in the heart of Locarno. The world in “The Fin” is a space plucked out time “no cars, no cell phones, and no sort of capitalistic logos invading the screen”.
A fishing pond inside an abandoned building is a colorful, kaleidoscopic oasis where the conflict between both groups is paused, accompanied by euphoric melodies. “There’s no story progression here, you just chill.” Visually, this space is a sharp contrast to the ecologically depleted scenarios surrounding it. “In the ocean, there’s red. In the city, there’s just black and white. And it’s 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.”
Our 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 “polluting the screen with textures. There’s 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.”
Park cites Harmony Korine “Julien Donkey-Boy”as a reference point for this digital innovation. That film, he said, “was shot with DV tape. Then they blew it up to 16 mm film and then 35 mm so there’s all these different sorts of pollution on the screen and that was the beauty of the film.” Similarly to the American director, Park decided to “expand the texture to give the sense of being a ghost or a spiritual element to the film.”
“The Fin” is very much concerned with a specter that still hunts the whole humankind: that of COVID-19. At that time, Park recalls “everyone 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.” 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.
In the midst of this dystopia, a sense of optimism arises from questioning the dividing lines that separate social groups. “I 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 human, I think that the film has succeeded. It’s about stating two things and then showing that the statements are very volatile,” he says in an invitation to avoid the conformism we are constantly forced to fall into.
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