June 1st, 2012
Our upcoming documentary film Planet of Snail will be screening at the ICA from the 22nd June and we are pleased to announce that the film's director Seung-Jun Yi will be coming over to the UK and taking part in a special Q&A in association with Sheffield Doc/Fest
Young-Chan has been deaf and blind since childhood. As he puts it himself, “In the beginning there was darkness and silence, and the darkness and silence were with god. And when ‘I’ arrived, they came to me.” Young-Chan has no idea how to participate in the world until he meets Soon-Ho, who also has a physical handicap. He marries her and learns to communicate with the outside world through her. By softly tapping each other’s finger, they can understand one another; it is sometimes as if they are tenderly playing a piano. This documentary follows the couple in the same gentle tempo as Young-Chan moves through his life. We see them replacing a lightbulb together, receiving friends, working on a theater piece, reading a book, and gliding on a sleigh down a mountain. These everyday scenes are accompanied by a poetic voice-over by Young-Chan, in which he reflects on his existence without sight and hearing. He feels like an astronaut, but that doesn’t mean he is without a sense of beauty in the world. This becomes palpable when Young-Chan touches the bark of a tree, runs his hand through sand, or brushes raindrops on a window pane with his fingertips.
Seung-Jun Yi will take part in a Q&A after the 6.15pm screening on Saturday 23 June - book your tickets here. The Q&A will be moderated by Sumantro Ghose, CEO at Asia House who host the Pan-Asia Film Festival. Also on the panel will be Sae-Won Lee, a Korean social worker working in London with the Physical Disabilities Team, Southwark Social Services who works with the deaf blind.
Find out more about the film on the website
