warning: this article includes suicide-related content
Throughout our lives, we have been constantly reminded that we would transform into butterflies as we become adults. We were led to believe that adolescence was merely a pupal stage, where all our dreams and hopes would take flight upon metamorphosis. However, my friends and I didn’t quite experience that butterfly-like transformation. Instead, we found ourselves undergoing a different kind of growth, akin to a dragonfly that, unlike the complete metamorphosis of a butterfly, only changes in size as it matures.
Hong Daye
I’m usually not a fan of personal documentaries, although I’ve often written about this “mode” of non-fiction, especially in regard to the Japanese documentary landscape (e.g. here). That being said, occasionally there are exceptions that grab my attention, Saving a Dragonfly by South Korean director Hong Daye is one of these. I missed it last year when it was screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, but thanks to the Taiwan IDF: 2024 on Tour, I had the chance to catch up with it.
The film is a visual diary of sorts, filmed by director Hong over six years, from her last years in high school, to her time in college, depicting her struggles, and those of her friends, in trying to navigate life in a society, South Korea, where entrance tests, and the college admission system, are treated as a matter of life and death. As far as I know, South Korea and Japan are the only two countries where the obsession for tests and entrance exams, originally a device used to solve the problem of huge classes in the postwar period, at least in the archipelago, is an integral part of what society demands from young people. This obsession ends up shaping the lives of the young generations and their families, from the time spent studying at night at cram schools almost daily, to the financial burden these schools often represent for the students’ families, resulting in debts, extra jobs, and occupation changes.
The documentary shows very clearly how this pressure, and the consequent fear of failure and judgment, is internalized by the young girls, pushing them, in the most extreme cases, towards attempts to commit suicide. The matter-of-fact tone in which some of the high school girls talk about the feeling of being worthless and abandoned after failing the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test), is spine-chilling. As the director comments in the film, in the final years at high school, the lives of the girls feel like a chrysalis to be crushed and consumed in order to become a dragonfly, the life after high school. However, oftentimes from this chrysalis no dragonfly is born, and young lives are sadly lost, hence the title.
Death and the shadow of suicide, of friends and of the director herself, permeate the whole film, and I don’t think it’s only a consequence of the Korean school system, while the pressure is undoubtedly there. At one point in the film, Hong confesses that she tried to cut her wrists a couple of times—towards the end we even see the cuts on her arm—feeling insecure, almost an act to “confirm her own worth”, this happened even once she finally entered university after retaking the exam.
While the first part of the documentary is composed of shots taken in 2014, during the last year of high school and just before the CSAT, the second half depicts the life of the director and her friends in university from 2016 to 2020. In this section there are more and longer descriptions of her own attempts to take her life, never overly dramatized, one of the qualities of the documentary. The gloomy feeling of not belonging is thus still there, even when the world outside moves on, for instance, we see briefly on screen protests on the streets, probably those of the so-called Candlelight Demonstrations (2016-2017), alternated with images of Hong and her friends curled up on a sofa. A hint of communality and purpose, on the one hand, solitude and aimlessness, on the other. In this part, the documentary is more an exploration of the existential crises the director went through at that stage of her life: the difficulties in connecting with her friends, and more broadly finding a way in life. Yet, at the core of it, at least this is my reading, there’s still that sense of failure and not living up to expectations instigated by the school system.
One of the most heartwrenching scenes in the film is when Hong and her parents recollect her suicide attempt on a bridge, the three of them are in a car and at one point her mother bursts into tears—we cannot see her face, the camera is on the back seat with the director. For a brief moment we have a glimpse of her relationship with her parents and of their feelings towards their daughter. The use of a moving car to elicit confessions or straightforward talk between people seems to be a tendency in the world of non-fiction, I’ve seen at least a couple of documentaries recently that employ this narrative device.
Saving a Dragonfly ends with some of her friends, now in their mid twenties, being interviewed by Hong, remembering and reflecting about their young years and the filming process they were part of, including sorrowful remembrance of a friend who took her life. This for me was probably the weaker segment of the film, I much preferred the spontaneity and directness of the images and sounds that came before, to the reflection a posteriori of what happened and was filmed five years prior.
In this regard, the aesthetics of the film reflect this difference: while the images of the parts filmed in high school, compared to the more polished ones shot at the time of college and after, might be, and indeed are, more “amateurish” and shaky, they are nonetheless more powerful and affective in their rawness. What particularly works here are the several moments of poetic truth scattered throughout the film, never overblown, and always expressed as a matter-of-fact, also through a lean editing. One that, for me, summarizes the documentary particularly well is this exchange between the director and a friend, on images of the blue sky over the city:
“I don’t get the colors right”
“It’s fine as long as the sky is beautiful”
“It doesn’t look like our future”
Asian Docs 