"My mother goes on a picnic once every three weeks." With these words, a daughter’s camera observes her mother's journey to the hospital for chemotherapy, reframing it as a picnic. By giving new meaning to an ordinary act, this deeply personal record becomes a cinematic attempt to heal life's pain and hardships, revealing the quiet power of intimate storytelling.

Director Choi Subin calls her mother’s chemotherapy trips, which take place every three weeks, a “picnic.” To give these journeys such a name, there must first have been deep sorrow. But Picnic makes no attempt to dwell on it, pointedly leaving that sorrow unsaid. Instead, the camera stays with the small rituals: preparing snacks, the drive to the hospital, the fellow patients her mother greets there. 

This choice is the film’s most powerful narrative act. For narrative is how we make sense of hardship, bring order to a chaotic world, and share that distilled wisdom with others. By accompanying this brief road movie, we are left with a profound sense of the will to live that underpins the most ordinary days, and of the quiet affection and respect that sustain them.

Every three weeks, I accompanied my mother to the cancer center for chemotherapy. The patients I met there, my mother among them, had lost none of their kindness, none of their quiet hope for the world. They worked to shield their pain with love, to live fully in the present, and to find the strength for tomorrow. After her diagnosis, I was the one who sank into grief. But paradoxically, it was through her resilience that I began to find my own way back to myself.

• Producer최수빈 CHOI Subin
• Cinematography 최수빈 CHOI Subin
• Edit 최수빈 CHOI Subin
• Sound 최수빈 CHOI Subin
• Cast 전영주 JEON Yeongju