SYNOPSIS
Choi Jinbae from Korea and Nyein Thazin from Myanmar are an international couple. They married seven years ago in Mandalay and, after a ceremony in Korea, planned to return. But COVID-19 left them stranded in Seoul. One day, a photo arrives from Myanmar showing a village destroyed by the coup. Urged by fellow Myanmar people to share their country's reality with the world, Choi picks up a camera. An ordinary family’s life is suddenly thrust into questions of pain, solidarity, and the ethics of bearing witness.
REVIEW
In 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Korean national Choi Jinbae and his wife, Nyein Thazin from Myanmar, began receiving photos and videos from her home country. They contained stark evidence of the violence and repression unleashed after the military coup. While Choi worked as a delivery driver and Nyein as a restaurant server in Korea, the couple devoted themselves to supporting Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement.
Filmed over five years, director Lim Daecheong’s debut feature follows the turbulent chapter the couple has lived through since the coup. As global attention to Myanmar’s struggle fades beneath the relentless tide of other conflicts, urgent video messages continue to arrive on their phones. Originally planning to center the film on footage of military violence and popular resistance, Lim ultimately shifts his focus to the couple’s emotional odyssey amid Myanmar’s prolonged political crisis.
Their inner world—marked by anxiety, guilt, and the strain of forging a life in a new country—is conveyed through a blend of observational and dramatized sequences. What emerges is not the portrait of unshakable activists, but of ordinary people who stumble and falter, yet persist. In their faces, sorrow and doubt are inseparable from resilience. To meet their gaze, the film suggests, is to begin the ethical work of bearing witness and extending solidarity to the suffering of others.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
The project began with footage preserved by a married couple, documenting the Myanmar military's brutality and the people's resistance. Initially, I intended to build the film around these powerful images. But as social media became saturated with similar depictions of violence, I realized that simply adding to this chorus would not distinguish the work. So, I made a decisive shift: abandoning the footage to instead focus on the couple's anxious, fragile emotional state. From the safety of South Korea, the film became my attempt to grapple with how to convey the horrors in Myanmar without showing them directly, and how to bridge the vast gulf between a world at peace and one consumed by violence.
CONTACT
LIM Daecheong
policepd@naver.com
