Glittering Hands
KOREA / 2014 / Korean, Korean Sign Language / Color / Blu-ray / 80 min
Director, Editing, Narration: Lee-Kil Bora
Photography: Lee-Kil Bora, Seong Joon-yong, Jeon Ji-hyun
Sound: Pyo Yong-soo
Music: Lih Min-jae Production Design: Jeon Ji-hyun
World Sales: CinemaDAL www.cinemadal.com
The director’s parents have finished raising their children and are once again as intimate as when they were first married. While the camera records their daily lives, the couple relays their shared memories in sign language: their youth, how they first met at church, everything that happened as they raised their children, and the hardships they endured managing their food stand. Alongside these memories are the experiences of the director and her younger brother, who, from a young age, had to mediate between their parents and society, serving as interpreters. Mingling home movies with photographs and diary excerpts, this film is a picture of one family’s past and its path towards the future.
[Director’s Statement] I am a hearing person. I learned sign language from my parents and learned spoken language from the world. However, because of the serious difference between my deaf parents’ world and my hearing world, I had a chaotic growth period between the deaf society and the hearing society. But as I grew to my mid-twenties, I realized that these two worlds surrounding my parents and me were very special things that only a few can experience. I have their unique special language and culture. The reason is that people who live their lives depending on all the other senses except hearing have their own special way of living. The absence of hearing makes ‘sounds’ that can be ‘seen’ only through their eyes. And I am ready to tell the world this special story from the perspective of a daughter.
Lee-Kil Bora
Lee-Kil Bora writes scripts and makes documentary movies as she believes that being born of deaf parents is the best gift for a storyteller. She dropped out of school at the age of 18, and took a journey to Southeast Asia on her own and wrote the story Road is School (2009) and Road-Schooler (2009). She entered the School of Film, TV and Multimedia at the Korea National University of Arts in 2009, where she studied and made documentaries.
Interview