Baek-il
2022 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Grace An
Genres: essay film, experimental, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
The Korean legend of Ungnyeo, a bear transformed into a woman, becomes a percussive meditation on transformation and quarantine.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A one-minute essay film about a bear-woman legend could've been twee mythology cosplay, but An refuses the narrative — she just *is* the transformation, percussion and all, which is the kind of stubborn formal choice that makes consensus scouts itch.
The percussion becomes the film's spine, a deliberate return to rhythmic abstraction as a way of thinking about myth; An's debt to structural and experimental cinema—the way she lets sound and transformation exist in pure form rather than plot—places this in a rigorous lineage that demands close watching.
That choice to let the body become rhythm instead of story, the percussion *as* the woman becoming *instead of* narrating it—that one decision, sustained for sixty seconds without flinching, does the entire work and costs nothing but conviction.