An elderly man brings home a broken fan and wrestles with it for hours until the blades spin again. He has put the blades on backward, but the wind is still cool. “My illness is the same as this fan.” Suffering from hearing loss and mental disability from a fall, he collects discarded objects in a small patch of woods in the heart of Haeundae and builds a world of his own. His granddaughter, who enrolled at art college only to lose the desire to draw, begins instead to capture her grandfather’s world with her camera. His world is full of useless things and incomprehensible happenings, but she willingly joins him on his outings. A strange portrait of an old man absorbed in useless things in a world that only values the useful, this film is also a warm and poignant record of the special friendship between a brusque grandfather and his affectionate granddaughter, as well as a self-reflective documentary that examines the documentarist’s position in looking at both the light and darkness of one person.
After majoring in Western Painting at Ewha Womans University, she studied documentary filmmaking in the Department of Broadcasting at the Korea National University of Arts. She directed short films including Is the Fan Broken? (2018) and Grandpa, Why Do You Like the Lottery? (2018), which screened at IndieForum. She has also participated in exhibitions held at venues including Dongdaemun Design Plaza and the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, where she presented works such as Seeking Apples (2015) and The Conflict of Mrs. Gupo (2017).
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
