Production : Takju Corp – Busan – South Korea
Music : Etienne de la Sayette
Director : Kim Ji-Gone
Year : 2024
In Busan, a road threads through four central districts—Seo-gu, Jung-gu, Dong-gu, and Busanjin-gu—offering sweeping views of the city below. It is called Mangyang-ro, literally “the road for gazing at the ocean.” Yet locals have long known it by another name: Jungbok Road. Rather than explaining the origin of these names, Forget the Ocean, When We Look at the Ocean dwells on the lives of those who inhabit this road, tracing the emotions embedded in its spaces and the quiet traces left by time.
Director Kim Jigon extends the work he began in his Grandma series around 2010, documenting the daily lives and living spaces of elderly women in this neighborhood. Here, the road becomes a living archive, and his camera a means of preserving its memory. Through meticulously composed shots and refined editing, the modest pharmacies, beauty salons, laundries, key repair shops, and photo studios along Mangyang-ro emerge with the precision and resonance of poetry. Together, these neighborhood fixtures form a harmonious visual composition—an unassuming yet deeply evocative portrait of place. In an era of relentless change and global acceleration, the film poses an urgent question: can one still preserve identity while keeping hold of place and community? The answer feels increasingly uncertain.
Paying quiet homage to aging and to the layers of time they embody, Forget the Ocean, When We Look at the Ocean remains faithful to documentary’s fundamental role as a record of what exists—while standing as a subtle yet firm act of resistance against Korea’s development ideology, with its fixation on erasing the old and replacing it with the new.