Invisible Light

Previous work by Gina Kim included autobiographical video films in which she investigated her own anorexia and her mother’s bulimia. With her first, beautifully-made feature, she has developed in a new direction. She links her quest for identity to alienation from her own body that changes drastically because of anorexia or pregnancy. Despite the fact that Kim places people and relationships in a mercilessly bright light, her sensitive début film is lively and hopeful. While they don’t know each other, the two women Gah-In and Do-Hee have two things in common: a man and loneliness. In California, Gah-in suddenly realises that her relationship with the married Jun is very superficial and not going anywhere. She closes herself off from everyone and everything; the situation becomes even worse through anorexia and she has to do her best to avoid sinking into a depression. The wife of Jun, Do-hee, is the focus of the second part. She is pregnant by another man and leaves, with abortion pills in her suitcase, for South Korea. In order to visit her senile grandmother, she asks an unknown barman to pretend to be her husband. In the meantime she has to make a quick decision about the abortion. But for the first time in years she is the middle point of her own life and, one way or another, this gives her new inspiration in a desperate situation.