Returning to Korea after ten years, Jiyeon confronts her long-buried story, caught between the fate her mother believes in and her own camera.
“Shaman Choi and my mother have known each other for over twenty years. When I was fourteen, I ran away from home for the first time. By the time I returned, my mother was on the verge of collapsing. Before dawn, the two of them took me to the seaside, struck my head with a dried pollock, and made me walk while tearing strips of cloth.
They believed the ritual would put an end to my wandering. It was my first gut, a Korean shamanic ritual.”
Opening with Jiyeon’s voice, the film follows a prophecy Shaman Choi made long ago: that Jiyeon was destined to die young. Jiyeon picks up a camera to trace what this prophecy has left behind in her life.
When Jiyeon invites someone else behind the camera to film her, she moves from director to subject, and the camera begins to shift from a device that records reality into a presence that transforms relationships. As the drums of the gut gather momentum, Jiyeon’s queer imagination begins a new dialogue with the world her mother has believed in all her life.
