Untitled.

[Winter in Sokcho (Koya Kamura, 2024) is streaming on Mubi. Spoiler alert. Watch it!]

Is it a French film if it is shot in the Korean lifeworld? Shot in a small town in South Korea called Sokcho. Sokcho, where a young woman of Korean-French origin, lives in wintry melancholy. French being the description of her runaway father. Father being the hint of a Freudian kerfuffle.

Is there an anthropological gaze on the girl stuck in her education of Korean and French literature? A gaze on her thin hands chopping octopuses endlessly. A gaze on the sun’s first rays falling on a bespectacled French nose. What is French or Korean about this film?

This film that survives as an epitaph of abandonment. A French stranger-artist. A lonesome French-speaking octopus-chopping, squid-ink-removing bed-and-breakfast girl. To be abandoned, one must be held and owned in the first place. Those who are never owned cannot be abandoned.

An ink portrait survives.

In another abandonment film The History of Sound (Oliver Hermanus, 2025), two male American musicians are torn apart by denial, and united in love, the other word for death. What survives is a 1917 record of folk songs recorded in the northern edges of Maine. Where winters are harsh, and fish is made of commerce. And Black girls sing as though the end of the world were near. Somewhere, there is a war.

What survives is a heartbroken ethnomusicologist.