A Petal

A girl of fifteen has not spoken since the day her mother was killed. She attaches herself to a labourer she sees at a graveside and starts staying in his shack. The man does not want her, beats her, drives her off; she does not go. At the same time her brother's friends are looking for her. What the girl is carrying is what happened in Gwangju in May 1980. Jang Sun-woo directed the film from a story by Choi Yun, and it became one of the first major South Korean productions to take the Gwangju massacre directly as its subject. What the army did in the city in May 1980 could not be spoken about for years. The telling does not narrate the event, it shows the body carrying it: the girl's inability to speak shapes the form of the film. Lee Jung-hyun made her screen debut in it at fifteen.