SONG Jeonghyo
After surviving child abuse and the collapse of her marriage, Yeonok confronts the time that had stood still as she clears out her ex-husband's room. By day, she sells a book at a book fair documenting her marriage and its aftermath. By night, she explores desire and sensation through consensual BDSM practices, while questioning whether the control she has reclaimed over her body could become another form of violence. During a Shibari performance on stage, she faces the audience's gaze, suspended within that question.
This film began with a question I couldn't understand: why did I want to tell a story about BDSM when I had never practiced it myself? I kept wondering how the shame of living in a body I could never fully control might be transformed into safe pleasure. At the same time, I couldn't stop doubting my own desire. How am I different from the person who abused me? How can violence and BDSM be different? Yeon-ok is someone who lives these questions out in the open. In this film, BDSM is not an answer or a space of liberation, but a practice of making, testing, and respecting boundaries. Her final performance is not a moment of triumph, but another moment of questioning. Through this film, I wanted to move my own questions outside myself. For me, creation is a form of play that helps endure sorrow.
Song Jeonghyo is a filmmaker and writer whose work centers on women¡¯s labor, migration, violence, bodies, and post-family lives. Through oral history interviews, documentary filmmaking, and nonfiction writing, Song explores the ways personal narratives reveal larger social structures and histories. Song studies fiction and nonfiction cinema at the Korea National University of Arts.