My Daughter Rescued from the Swamp by Lee Mi-rye

My Daughter Rescued from the Swamp (수렁에서 건진 내 딸, 1984)

Director Lee Mi-rye

Yuri is every parent’s nightmare: a creatively destructive teenager. Her reddish hair seems to have marked her out as different from early childhood, while high school bullies and rigid school principals sharpen her sense of rejection. Her mother struggles to impose some control, even as Yuri turns her room into a fuchsia-coloured nightmare. Meanwhile her actor father seems less than useless: Yuri’s innate sense of teenage grievance only grows more severe when she witnesses his adultery. Drinking and glue-sniffing contribute their damage. A final, fragile reconciliation between Yuri and her father will be achieved only at considerable cost.

For her first film, director Lee had the good fortune to cast the extraordinary Kim Jin-ah as Yuri. Here she plays opposite her real mother Kim Bo-ae. Considering the way Yuri treats her film mother, the two must have had lots to talk about between scenes.

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*Filming Against The Odds is programmed in collaboration with the Korean Film Archive and curator Mark Morris