Beolsae (House of Hummingbird)

In Kim Bo-ra’s House of Hummingbird, teenager Eun-hee (Park Ji-huk, giving a stunning performance) goes unrecognised and isolated in most of the spheres she operates in. As the youngest daughter in her family, her parents pay avid attention to the success and failure of her older brother, but mostly ignore her. This brother, pressured to achieve academic success, lets out his frustrations violently at his younger sister, and is only cautioned for it once when he does it in a way that shows disrespect to his father. At school, she is ostracised – her family isn’t rich, and her talents don’t lend themselves to success in a conventional learning environment. Her blossoming relationship to a boyfriend seems tender and close, but he doesn’t seem to take it as seriously as she does. Her relationship with her best friend becomes strained over time when Eun-hee’s problems become so overwhelming that she stops being able to support or even see her friend’s problems. 
It’s hard to discover your own identity in an environment so unsupportive, where you might as well be a ghost haunting the halls. Without any clear pathways into the future or a sense of who she might want to be, and nobody believing there is anything she could do at all, Eun-hee seems stuck, and in a film where she is in every scene, this lack of genuine connection to others or to herself plays into the sense of loneliness.

There is a shift when a new Chinese teacher begins working at Eun-hee’s cram school. Young-ji (Kim Sae-byeok) takes an interest in Eun-hee, inviting her to stay and have tea with her, and share what she is actually passionate about. She gives Eun-hee a sense that there are ways to exist in the world that she might not have previously considered, ways that are more unconventional than were thinkable to her within the confines of her family. Young-ji has taken a break from University to teach at the cram school, and she seems invested in giving herself time to grow and change. She functions like a window into a world that was previously closed to Eun-hee, a world that might allow her to use her talent for drawing, a world that might actually see her, where she does not have to exist in the background anymore. At the same time, the need for surgery removes Eun-hee from her family and into a hospital environment, where the other patients dote on her – an experience so foreign and new to her that she seems to prefer staying at the hospital to going home to her parents. A girl named Yuri (Hye-in Seol) shows interest in her and it’s the first time someone appears to do so with genuine care and effort. 

Set in 1994, the film works within a historic framework of notable events that are mostly mediated through a television screen. Korea’s progress through the FIFA World Cup, the death of North Korea’s leader Kim Il-sung, the tragic and devastating collapse of the Seongsu Bridge in October that will have repercussions for Eun-hee all happen in the background of scenes until the last one fully draws her attention, the way that events that might have a personal impact, not a theoretical one, do. The disaster robs Eun-hee of who may just be the most important person in her life so far, and yet it can’t take from her the belief that there is a future for her out there that is waiting, in spite of all the obstacles ahead of her. 

2018, directed by Kim Bo-ra, starring Park Ji-hu, Kim Sae-byeok, Jeong In-gi, Son Sang-yeon, Lee Seung-yun, Park Soo-Yeon.