SYNOPSIS
The film follows an abandoned son's search for the mother who left him. Like the final scene of Im Kwon-taek’s Gilsotteum (1986), which evokes the primal power of Korean kinship, this journey is filled with lingering images and sounds. Chronicling his travels through Japan, Portugal, and Spain, the film traces the unbreakable—if unseen—thread of blood that connects a mother and son, and extends through a scattered people.
REVIEW
The film opens with an arresting chain of images: insects mating, a baby crawling through a garden, a letter signed “Mother,” adoption records. This elliptical sequence, like a series of obstructions in our path, sketches the contours of a journey that will span two decades—culminating in 2010, when long-awaited clues from a private investigator finally hint at the whereabouts of the filmmaker’s mother.
Letter to an Unknown Mother is the debut documentary from Cho Jinseok, a Portuguese-based adoptee filmmaker. Told in the form of a letter, it unfolds non-linearly—moving between the moment of birth, personal records, cross-border detective work, and dead-end explorations. At its core lies a persistent question: what does “mother” mean for the filmmaker? Is it the instinctive pull toward origins, mere curiosity about an absent figure, or—as the film’s wandering form suggests—an odyssey whose destination remains elusive? Perhaps it is also an inquiry into cinema itself, resisting easy categorization.
On another level, Letter to an Unknown Mother is an essay film built on the tension between word and image. From questions about his mother to reflections on his present life, from Pedro Costa to Im Kwon-taek’s Gilsotteum (1986), this decade-long production becomes a dual search—for personal roots and for a cinematic identity. It is both an exploration of existence and of cinema’s own restless quest for self-definition.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
The great critic and filmmaker Tony Rayns once wrote about Im Kwontaek’s masterpiece “Gilsoddeum” that it was a “Fassbinderesque fiction about a dispersed family that comes back together, only to find that the pieces no longer fit”. Those words have stuck with me ever since I read them and they define a big part of my life: I came from a dispersed family and all these pieces inside me no longer fit with any sense of “Korean-ness” or my birth family. This film was an attempt to exorcise some demons and make sense of my disconnection to so much in life.
CONTACT
Big Panic Pty Ltd
benxcho@gmail.com
