Director’s Statement

Why am I doing this? I’m an outsider with no ties to Naro Island, so people often ask. Honestly, there’s no necessity to any of this: if I quit today, the world will go on. Sure, my subjects, my team and I will be disappointed, but in the larger scheme of the universe, the disappointment will be a speck. 

Yet I am still here, after three years of encountering the island as a traveler. Falling in love sometimes needs only one second of a double-take. “Huh! How curious!” In that second of childhood you cannot imagine the life you will build from there. 

At first, my curiosity felt superficial. The grandmas reminded me of my own, who passed away. They shared stories about Naro’s past and we napped together. I had a vague idea to translate my curiosity into filmmaking, partly because I was unemployed at the time. 

I kept returning because the worlds I witnessed got bigger and deeper. I wanted to understand what I was seeing, only to understand that I never really would – but that’s the beauty of exploration. So I talked to scientists, widows, supermarket owners, and rocket cleaners. Eunwoo fed our crew BBQ dinners by the grill. Grandma Soonae’s last words to me after the rocket launch in November 2025 was, “Don’t go home. Stay here with me.” After I went home, Soonae was hospitalized forever.

This film is my personal exploration of kindness and vulnerability: what it means to see, listen, open one’s life to a stranger. It is an expression of my gratitude to the islanders, who are longing to be remembered. It is a subtle political statement about the value of human lives beyond utility; this is my form of resistance against a numbers-driven, male-dominated national project. The islanders’ lives are fated to disappear, replaced by rockets. We tenderly memorialize this home, delaying saying goodbye too soon.