The Weight, our favorite film so far in Fantasporto
The Weight Directed by Jeon Kyu-hwan
Produced by Kim Woo-taek & Choi Min-ae
Written by Jeon Kyu-hwan
Starring Jo Jae-hyun; Park Ji-a
Music by Ju Dae-gwan
Cinematography Kim Nam-gyun
Editing by Kim Mi-yeong Park Hae-o
Running time 108 mins.
Country South Korea
The Weight (Hangul: 무게; RR: Muge; MR: Muge) is a 2012 South Korean film about a hunchback mortician and his transgender stepbrother.
It made its world premiere in the Venice Days sidebar of the 69th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the 2012 Queer Lion, an award for the "best film with a homosexual and queer culture theme."[4] It is the first Korean film to have won the prize. Jeon Kyu-hwan was also awarded Best Director at the 16th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and the Silver Peacock award for best director at the International Film Festival of India.
Most of director Jeon Kyu-hwan's previous films, including Berlinale-featured Varanasi and Dance Town, have dealt with the underbelly of society. The Weight is his fifth feature-length film.
Jung is the mortician at the morgue who has to heavily rely on medicine for his severe tuberculosis and arthritis. Despite his illness, cleansing and dressing the dead is a noble and even beautiful work to him. Jung is the last living person who silently takes care of the dead. So for him, his life at the morgue is both a reality and a fantasy while the corpses are his models and friends for his paintings, his sole living pleasure.
Born with a hunchback and left at an orphanage, Jung was adopted by a woman who hid him away in the attic only to use him as a child slave for her dress shop. The woman's own son Dong-bae is younger than Jung; he has always wanted to become a woman, loathing his own male body. While Jung feels affection and sympathy for his younger stepbrother, he feels burdened by Dong-bae's struggles. Under the weight of life and death carried by the dead bodies that he faces each day coupled with his love-hate relationship with Dong-bae, Jung endures the pain and thirst that he feels like a camel crossing a desolate desert in silence. Then he quietly prepares his biggest, his last gift for his sibling.
