What livens a theater is people who visit the theater and each visitor’s own memories about the theater. Adieu, Paradise is a short collection of 10-year memories of the Seoul Art Cinema located in Nakwon Arcade, currently moved to Seoul Cinema this April. The film illuminates inside and outside the theater bit by bit with the voices of people who remember the Seoul Art Cinema in the days of Nakwon Arcade. Their Nakwon, meaning paradise, ranges from their hope for the theater to be ‘a place whenever people can come back’ to the fate of the theater at ‘a great turning point from filmbased film industry to the digital’. The film also takes people who the audiences wouldn’t remember into the screen. It silently shows projectionists, translators and subtitle editors who deal with films behind the screen. As the film occasionally shows clips of ‘Open Talk’ that the Seoul Art Cinema had consistently held, the theater revives. In the film, JUNG Sung-il, a film critic, looked back on his memories about the theater saying “My first connection with the Nakwon was watching The Summertime Killer in the time Hollywood Theater existed.

Later I watched Romeo and Juliet, The Getaway by Sam PECKINPAH and Chelsia My Love.” This shows the moment when personal history about a theater becomes times of film and history of film. In the documentary, another film critic HUH Moon-Yung quotes a passage of Jean RENOIR, “far from taking refuge in ... nostalgia ... plunge into the hell of the new world” in order to show his positive perspective for relocation of the Seoul Art Cinema. In these ways, the film says goodbye to the Seoul Art Cinema in the days of Nakwon. This time, the goodbye means not the end but greeting for the new beginning as we all know. (JEONG Ji-hye