Synopsis
My Own Breathing is the last of BYUN Young-joo’s The Murmuring trilogy about comfort women, produced over the period of seven years. While the first two documentaries portray the elderly victims’ pain and process of healing by focusing on their everyday life in the community of the House of Sharing, the third documentary, My Own Breathing, delivers their accounts of history, criticism of the present and hopes for the future through their own voices.

Program Note
The Murmuring and Habitual Sadness portray the Japanese comfort women’s memory of the past, current daily lives, and
 struggles to change their future surrounding their community space, the ‘House of Sharing’. It must be painful, even to the director,
 to film their desperate voices and share the records with the audience at numerous theaters and film festivals in and out of the
 country.
 However, the director started all over again. Although the director became close to the old women, asking about their past and
 experiences is still recording their historical tragedy from a third person perspective. BYUN introspected that her work can never be
 enough to accurately reflect their own voices and this reflection made her pluck up her spirits once more.
 My Own Breathing fielded LEE Yong-soo as a subject who questions other comfort women. Having suffered from sexual slavery in
 a comfort station located in Shingu area, Taiwan, Lee visits other comfort women living outside the House of Sharing to interact not
 as a simple interviewer but as a person directly involved in the same experiences.
 As a result, KIM Yoon-sim, who earned a livelihood by needlework for over 30 years after she came back from a comfort station
 and got married and who later received the JEON Tae-il Literary Award for her writing with the catch phrase ‘Shame is not for us but
 you’, finally reveals her hidden pain to her deaf daughter. In this scene, KIM overcomes her pain by talking in sign language with her
 daughter. The moment’s quiver from KIM and her daughter is delivered to us through the director’s camera. [LEE Angela]