Writing Poems at the End of the World + Intro and Q&A

The final evening of Lingering Fragments brings together three contemporary works by young Korean artists and filmmakers who challenge the conventions of cinematic practice with striking, deeply personal films—all making their UK premiere. These works speak to one another in subtle and surprising ways, offering contrasting perspectives and tones while reflecting on themes of memory, dislocation, uncertain futures, and even the end of the world. Each film takes an experimental approach to questions of body, language, and environment.

Both intimate and inventive in form, the films shift between humour and melancholy, the mundane and the surreal. A shared concern with distance emerges—whether between people or between the self and the external world. The films often use sound to draw attention to subtle visual details or to alter how we perceive what appears on screen. Whether tracing virtual disconnection or finding resonance in natural elements and memory materials, these works express a desire to locate oneself within an uncertain world.

Closing the programme is Kim Wonwoo’s Writing Poems at the End of the World, which gives this screening its title and around which it was conceived—a visually and thematically rich work that transforms the act of filmmaking into a ritual of reflection, offering a singular and poetic encounter between image, sound, and memory.

While distinct in approach, each work offers a meditation on how we relate to our environment through a dreamlike kaleidoscope of light, image, and texture, all touched with playful and witty humour.

Together, these films bring the season to a poignant and expressive close, leaving behind an indelible trace of lingering images.

Filmmaker Kim Wonwoo will join us for an introduction and Q&A.

• Glistening Seagull
  글리스닝 시걸
  Directed by Yu Chae
  10 min | 2024 | Korea | Colour | Korean with English subtitles | UK Premiere
  
  Copy Source: Filmmaker
  
  Yu Chae’s Glistening Seagull is an impressionistic burst of vibrant, zooming 16mm imagery and sensory fragments, with its visual rhythm informed by a haunting and evocative soundscape in which the ripples of water run through the mind. In the filmmaker’s own words: “The film explores visual reminders of objects and surroundings of memory to the void and absence tied to it, offering a path for the mechanism of memory.”
  
  Yu Chae is a Korean filmmaker based in the USA. She experiments with images and sound in both digital and 16mm formats.
• E.T. Phone Home
  이티는 집에 가고 싶어
  Directed by Lee Si-nae
  16 min | 2021 | Korea/France | Colour | Korean & French with English subtitles | UK Premiere
  
  Copy Source: Filmmaker
  
  E.T. Phone Home is a poetic, introspective video essay that explores the experience of living between two worlds. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, it explores familial relationships across digital space and the emotional distance between parents and children living on opposite sides of the world. With a light touch and playful sense of irony, the film captures the absurdity, anxiety, and estrangement of life under lockdown.
  
  Lee Si-nae is a Korean artist working across video, installation and performance, based in France. She focuses on themes such as identity, movement, roots and distance, exploring the tension of “not quite here, but no longer fully there”.
• Writing Poems at the End of the World
  세상의 끝에서 적는 시
  Directed by Kim Wonwoo
  30 min | 2024 | Korea/France | Colour and B&W | Korean with English subtitles | UK Premiere
  
  Copy Source: Filmmaker
  
  A series of short films created as part of a larger, ongoing feature project, counting down the days to the end of the world. These are visual poems: fragmented images and sounds, fleeting impressions of life on Earth. Through this ritualistic process, the inevitable is gently postponed. A film of murmurs and echoes, of tactile textures and quiet intensity. It captures the human condition and the surrounding environment with delicate sensitivity. In this richly textured work, a dynamic relationship between image and sound is formed, exploring the world through the lens of finality; the end beckons, but life continues to flourish.
  
  Kim Wonwoo is a Korean filmmaker based in France, currently developing a feature-length expansion of Writing Poems at the End of the World. The short film premiered at the Punto de Vista Film Festival in Pamplona, Spain, where it was awarded Best Short Film.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Kim Wonwoo.