Changgyeonggung Palace is a space where zoo, amusement park, and ancient palace overlap. This place, remembered as childhood fantasy, became a complex image combining animal suffering with everyday landscapes through liberation and war. Rhythmic sounds flowing over layered images reveal fractures between past and present, fantasy and trauma. This film summons traces of emotions embedded in Changgyeonggung, questioning how public history, autobiographical experience, and spatial materiality intersect and interact with each other.

* Each Critics’ Choice screening will be followed by a Critics’ Talk—a one-on-one conversation between the director and a critic. 

* Note: This talk will be conducted in Korean without interpretation.​ 

Chang Gyeong is an experimental documentary that confines itself to a single site, allowing the place itself to become the film. That place is Changgyeongwon, a historic palace whose layered history embodies the vitality of a small, self-contained world. Built in the 15th century, it endured the upheavals of Japanese occupation and the Korean War, and in 1977 its famous zoo was relocated to Seoul Grand Park. The film recounts this history in eight chapters, each marked by a terse intertitle. These titles form an oblique dialogue with the images—leaves and branches, taxidermied animals, abstract shapes—suggesting relationships that are never fully fixed. The interplay between text and image moves from abstraction to figuration, stillness to motion, and silence to sound. 

In the final words we hear, we learn that even after more than forty years, the restoration of Changgyeongwon remains incomplete. The film is ultimately a portrait of an unfinished palace and an irretrievable time, one that transforms history into images of transcendence and invites us to experience these images as a form of open poetry.

This film explores the shifting landscapes born from the collision of personal memory, historical records of Changgyeong Palace, and a changing sense of life itself. Historical texts about the palace intersect with images filmed on its grounds today. Plants collected from the site—where few physical traces of the past remain—are pressed against the film stock, their decay gradually eating away at the emulsion, erasing and creating all at once.

• Producer이장욱 LEE Jangwook
• Screenplay 이장욱 LEE Jangwook
• Cinematography 이장욱 LEE Jangwook
• Edit 이장욱 LEE Jangwook
• Production Design 이장욱 LEE Jangwook
• Sound 이장욱 LEE Jangwook
• Music 이장욱 LEE Jangwook

LEE Jangwook

spacecell2004@gmail.com