Yukiko

“Can you mourn for a person of whom you have no memory?” This is the question that comes up in this calm kaleidoscope of intimate impressions and associations that connect three women: director Young Sun Noh, her mother, who was born and still lives in Korea, and her Japanese grandmother, who traveled to Seoul during the Japanese occupation of Korea to join her Korean lover. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, she returned alone to Tokyo. Hardly anything else is known about her.

Noh’s mother, who was still a young child when the Korean War broke out, also has no memory of her. Call her “Yukiko,” she once suggested. Over images of everyday landscapes, houses, a memorial and a home for the elderly, Noh muses about the old love story, and about daughters growing up far away from their mothers—she left home to study in France. A meeting on the island of Okinawa widens her perspective, and the universal tragedy of history gradually emerges in this contemplative film.