Film Journal 2024: Love Life
Directed by Koji Fukada
A film about loving from a distance. Or perhaps about loving through the distance.
As an intimately drawn human drama, grief creatss this distance. Pain creates this distance. The complexities and struggles of relationship, especially familial relationship, creates this distance. Muteness and the physical barriers to communication create this distance.
On a functional level, the fact that so much of this film speaks using Korean sign language becomes a powerful tool for imagining the idea that love can breach this distance. On a spiritual and philopshical level, it is the simple presence of peope thrust into the shared space of mutual experience that becomes a way of understanding how love can breach this distance. Not as an abstract and culturally conditioned word, but as a lived expression.
The Stories of my Life 