SYNOPSIS
Sunk in chronic lethargy, "I" follow my mother on a walk along Namdaecheon stream and recall an old elementary school assignment: catch a planarian. I never found one back then; I just played on the trampoline ("bang-bang") nearby. An unsolved mystery remained: do planarians really live in Namdaecheon? This film is the story of a middle-aged woman with a new ADHD diagnosis who, in trying to find the answer, tumbles down a rabbit hole of planarian obsession.
REVIEW
BangBang and Planaria is an offbeat, spirited journey to complete a 35-year-old assignment: finding a planaria. The film begins with the director’s memory of an elementary school science project to collect the tiny flatworms. From there, she tracks down a 1980s-era science textbook, rummages through photo albums in her family home, and searches for her old science teacher. Along the way, she receives a medical diagnosis that finally explains a lifelong condition and calmly unpacks the family traumas she has carried for years.
“Some memories never wash away,” she says—and the film becomes a way of working through them. What might at first seem scattered is, in fact, deftly woven together by threads of recurring keywords and motifs. While it maintains a light, playful tone on the surface, it reaches deep into layers of personal and familial trauma. Much of its charm comes from the director’s on-screen persona: straightforward, buoyant, and irrepressibly resilient.
Like a planaria that can divide and regenerate, she reveals multiple versions of herself—from her childhood self to her most vulnerable—yet chooses to lead the film with her bright, irreverent side. At last, she finds the elusive planaria, raises a toast to completing a 35-year-old quest, and immediately embarks on a new one: locating the place in a recently discovered photograph of her late father. BangBang and Planaria closes on a new beginning, leaving us eagerly awaiting the sequel.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
To what extent are we governed by memory? And what drives an obsession with events recalled since the age of ten? Diagnosed with ADHD at forty-five, I began combing through my childhood, searching obsessively for clues to my own mind. This film follows a singular mission: to complete a school assignment forgotten for thirty-five years by catching planaria in the Namdaecheon River. What unfolds is a kind of video rehabilitation—a return to the past in search of the dopamine needed to live fully in the present.
