2014 Seoul Independent Film Festival
 

Synopsis
KIM Alex was born in Uzbekistan, a descendant of Koreans forcibly moved by Stalin to Central Asia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Alex\'s personal fortune was confiscated by the Uzbek government. Alex now runs a small 24-hour restaurant, \"Tashkent\" in Ansan, South Korea. Alex’s story brings forth a more complex history of mobility and migration across Asia - the story of the survival and revival of Soviet Koreans over the last 150 years
 

Program Note

 A landscape comes on the screen. After a while, a person comes and tells a story about her/himself. Audiences hear Russian language with interrupted by \'strange\' Korean (Koryo language) intermittently. Narrating \'self\' with dual languages, which extends within and outside frames in the auditory sense, makes a narrative. Resonating this structure, insert cuts, appearing as many times as \'self\'s narrating her/himself, pans and cast their glances, like a gaze of someone, inside and outside frames, then fixed at KIM Jeong, the director of this film, and finally extend the space in the visual sense. Here, the extended auditory/visual sense has the ethics of this documentary. When the film showing respect and devoting time to approach each place with each history, a landscape finally comes to be a place bearing the narrative and historiography of \'self\'s. Although it\'s obvious the landscapes and places in this documentary involve the individual/official migrant history of Koryo people deported the Maritime Provinces of the Soviet Union to central Asia, presenting the trauma of the history is not the film\'s main concern. Instead,
 taking \'migration\' as dynamics, it travels between each person and place, while weaving histories of places where each person immigrated to, like a play of metonymy and depicts a new way of dealing with trauma. Moreover, the chronotope of this film add another layer of mourning with the director/narrator narrating her history and trauma. [HWANG Miyojo]