‘Where is your real home?’ is the question many of her friends often ask the film’s heroine, who lives alone near her school. For most of them, their real home is elsewhere. Yet, she doesn’t know how to answer this question. Her family is a bit different from everyone else’s. The experience of growing up separated from her family must have put her under a lot of pressure. The ‘I’, who is at once the narrator and director of the film, hopes to examine closely the relationship between ‘me’ and ‘family’ through this documentary. At the same time, she focuses on those questions she could not answer before. The title, The Close Family, is itself a paradox since the family in the film has fallen apart. Her only sibling, who is 7 years younger than her, suffers from cerebral palsy and was long ago committed into the center for handicapped children. ‘I’ grew up in the countryside. Ever since ‘I’ left the youth shelter, ‘I’ have been living alone without much contact with other family members.

The film gives the director an opportunity to reconstruct the story of her family and serves as a link that connects her to her family. The places in her memories are brought back to life one by one through the lens of the camera. Often we see that the properties of a film are used to create an impact; for example, the sound in the film feels characteristically dim and distant. Along with photos from her childhood, her mother’s grave, the places where the family lived together, the ‘lonely and stifling’ landscapes in the countryside, and places of her youth, the camera directly confronts the family members – her father, aunt and even her brother. However, it is difficult to overcome the distance that already exists among them. The ideal of a ‘close family’ is only confirmed by ‘my’ life alone in a rented room. Yet, she is aware that a single documentary cannot provide all the answers and so ‘I’ simply record such relationships with the camera. This is my family photo album that I didn't keep, and my home video that I’ve never taken. All my family members have been scattered for 8 years now. ‘I’ miss them, but it seems years of estrangement were so deep that I wasn’t able to knock on their doors. So ‘I’ decided to find and see them under the cloak of making a documentary. There are numerous types of families. Some might say my family is a total mess, but I call my family the close family. (KIM Dong-hyun)