Program Note
 With a father whose face she barely knows and a mother gone crazy, Kiki has been living with her maternal grandmother. However, her grandmother is caught up in her own emotional wounds; her despair that has come from having experienced the death of two of her children by drowning. Since even her grandmother cannot be a good nurturer, Kiki’s adolescence lacks the necessary emotional support and positive reinforcement of self-identity that should come naturally for everyone. Consequently she slips into self-injury - she slits her wrists countless times; she engages in destructive sex and alcoholism; she has an adulterous relationship that lacks any sort of emotional pay-back with a man old enough to be her father. Her process shows that the sense of a ‘borderline,’ as the film\'s title suggests, did not exist in Kiki’s consciousness in the first place. Why? Perhaps because she is so greatly infected by her grandmother’s despair and her mother’s madness. What is her route past all this? To affirm herself through sex that breaks down the borderline between two bodies. It is in the sea of ‘non-real’ that has no moral standard or the sense of the real that she might feel comfortable – as comfortable as a baby in her mother’s womb. If her ability to never cry, or disability to cry, is the safety valve for her borderless life, the “foster father” - the literature professor twenty-three years her senior - gives her the space for her “struggle for acceptance,” resisting the mother’s world that sucks her in. Borderline is a woman’s cinematic Bildungsroman that examines the ever-difficult issue of the scars of a woman’s life - stigmata easily imprinted on the female body; it also presents a women-to-women relationship in intriguing images. (JOO You-sin)