Deaf and blind since childhood, this documentary follows Young-Chan as he gently moves through his life.








Young-Chan has been deaf and blind since childhood. As he puts it himself, βIn the beginning there was darkness and silence, and the darkness and silence were with god. And when βIβ arrived, they came to me.β 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 otherβs 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 doesnβt 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.
Yi Seung-Jun is one of Korea's emerging directors in the world documentary scene. Among a dozen TV length documentaries and shorts, Seung Jun directed Children of god (2008), a story about the children living in the crematorium of Nepal, which has travelled the world including Hotdocs and is being distributed worldwide. His interest in filmmaking has always focused on the life of, so called the unseen minorities, which has become his signature style of filmmaking. With his new feature length documentary 'Planet of Snail' Seung Jun teamed up with world class creative talents from literally all over the world including a Lebanese editor and a Finnish sound designer let alone the international funders and broadcasters. Yi's experiments on this ambitious project in every aspect of filmmaking broadened his view on documentary as a filmmaker.
IF YOU LIKE PLANET OF SNAIL