Wangsimni, My Hometown

A man returns to his Seoul neighborhood after 14 years abroad and finds everything changed—real estate is booming, old friends have scrambled up the social ladder, the woman he loved is married to someone else. Im Kwon-taek later described it as his first attempt to put images and impressions into the frame rather than dialogue, a turning point in his understanding of the possibilities of cinema. Shot at the height of the 1970s development boom, the film records Wangsimni’s transformation with documentary precision, while Shin Seong-il’s returning exile drifts through it like a ghost, shadowed throughout by Choi Byeong-geol’s melancholy theme song. The film closes on the ancient Salgojidarigyo stone bridge, with Seongdong Bridge and the rushing city beyond: two men stranded between an irrecoverable past and an indifferent present. That closing image is one of the decade’s most haunting: before Mandala, before Sopyonje, this is where Im Kwon-taek the artist begins to emerge. Digitally mastered in 2011 under the supervision of the Korean Film Archive.