A few years after her marriage to Seongman, Areum decides to go to France to study and finally make the kind of films that are not possible in Korea. Seongman, however, has nothing to do in France and, as he doesn’t understand French, is sliding into depression. A joint project is to help against homesickness. They open the one-table restaurant “Oegil” to provide South Korean expats with culinary memories of home.

Of course, this means that Areum has no time left for filmmaking. When she gets pregnant, massive chaos is looming. After the birth she finally focuses on her studies and Seongman takes over as house husband – a role that overwhelms him so much that he goes on strike. In this challenging everyday life, she must assert herself as a woman, artist, mother and spouse. The feminist narrative determines the point of view from which Areum Parkkang, in this second part of her autobiographical film project, examines her own life, its comedy, tragedy and planning uncertainty. The tone is charming throughout, and the energy of her reflective self-observation is infectious. Areum lets us participate head-on in her back and forth as an independent filmmaker between festival pitchings, homesickness and the baby change unit.

Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.