Film title: I'm Cyborg, But That's OK (2006)
Director: PARK Chan-wook
Runtime: 105 mins
Venue: Multi-purpose Hall, Korean Cultural Centre
Time: Thursday 8th October, 7:00pm

This film, set in a mental hospital, shows the vague romance between Yong-goon, who believes she is a cyborg, and Il-soon, who believes he can steal other people's personality traits. A number of Korean critics criticized this film for ignoring the question of "why?". This kind of discussion had in truth continued from PARK's previous films. In the "Revenge Trilogy" it is really never asked "why" revenge is being taken; they are films that viciously assault the viewer, asking the viewer how the process of revenge changes and what the viewers themselves think about the process. If you ask "why" with Cyborg, a number of guesses could be made in response. The film makes no diagnosis of this. Viewers complained that in the process of showing the lives of two protagonists lost in fantasy they could not find any casual relationship, and as such, even after seeing the conclusion, they found no traces of transcendence or sublimation. PARK replied that that was not what he was interested in.

The dilemmas of characters in a PARK film always end up unresolved. In this film, the characters' fantasies are not a problem, since no matter what they are, the characters live by forming their own harmonies with their surroundings. Because none of them asks "why," it is the people outside the film who ask "why". They also reproach the fact that the story was made with cause and effect left out in this way, asking, "Isn't that childish? Isn't it a kind of artistic fraud?" On the contrary, I feel more positively about PARK's trivial, playful gaze. In his taste for asking the audience, "I don't know about other things, but isn't this kind of thing fun too?" there is a deeply imbued denial of major ideology or narrative. This follows from a composed optimism that says the world must change, but it definitely won't be easy.