Home Ground
KWON Aram
- South Korea
- 2022
- 74min
- 12 +
- DCP
- color/black and white
WP
Synopsis
‘Chanel’ in Myeong-dong in the 1970s was the secret hideout for Butches and Femmes. In 1996, young lesbians opened Korea's first lesbian bar, Lesbos. In the early 2000s, queer teens looking for a community gathered in a small park in Sinchon. Myung-woo, who ran 'Lesbos' nearby, was still guarding the place 20 years later. As the coronavirus crisis hit, the bar has lost its customers. Will she able to protect the place this time?
Review
In 1996, Korea's first lesbian bar, Lesbos opened. ‘Myung-woo’, who runs the bar that reopened in 2019, is struggling to protect it amid the Coronavirus crisis. The film reflects on the three spaces that performed similar roles to that of Lesbos through reenactments and interviews. In the 1970s, lesbians used to spend time at Chanel, a women-only coffee shop in Myeong-dong. In the early 2000s, teenage lesbians formed a community in ‘Sinchon Park’. Myeong-woo experienced the twists and turns of lesbian-only spaces in person from the 1970s to the present as a customer of ‘Chanel’ and as the owner of ‘Lesbos’, a bar across from ‘Sinchon Park’. Even though the times and places are different, visitors remember these spaces as comfortable and safe places, and precious liberated zones which had allowed them to form their own identity. Home Ground is a film that shows the necessity and self-reliance of a lesbian community that transcends time.
Director
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KWON Aram
She interests lie in recording the memory of queers in the other side of the cities. She co-directed To become 2(2012),Queer Room(2018) and with 463 - Poem of the Lost(2018), dealt with the story of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery of Koreans.