Seoul-based Syeyoung Park is an interesting independent filmmaker. A graduate of the Korea National University of Arts, with a BFA in Film and an MFA in Video Arts, Park made his feature debut with The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, which earned him awards at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, Seoul Independent Film Festival, and Fantasia, among others.

The Fin, which premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, is set in a speculative, post-unification Korea, an unusual but compelling backdrop that reflects today’s tensions and anxieties through a futuristic lens.

Park resists typical storytelling structures, or at least that’s how it feels at first, opting instead for metaphor and memory. The Fin brings a vision of urban desolation haunted by slow violence: environmental degradation, social abandonment, and the breakdown of meaning. The film’s murky, grain-filled aesthetic reflects Park’s philosophical approach, one that treats the realities of low-budget cinema not as limitations but as opportunities for inventive expression.

Drawn to neglected and forgotten spaces – such as underground fishing stores and crumbling industrial spaces – Park’s work explores spaces where time seems to halt. In The Fin, these dead zones reflect emotional deadness, limbo, and estrangement in a society that has moved forward but left something essential behind.

Just ahead of the premiere, Park Syeyoung spoke with View of the Arts about making post-unification dystopias, finding rhythm through long edits, and resisting the lure of a polished future.

View of the Arts: The Fin is set in a post-unification Korea – a backdrop that has long fascinated Korean filmmakers. What drew you to imagining this speculative future?

Park Syeyoung: I spent my childhood growing up in Toronto, Canada. One of the first questions non-Asians would ask me was where I was from. When I replied, “Korea,” they would always follow up with “South or North?” – often adding, “nuclear bomb or democracy?” The dichotomy between these two poles always struck me as far too simplistic.

When I moved back to South Korea later on, I came face to face with a lot of propaganda against North Korea as well. Back in Canada, my parents would tell me that we might be united soon. But after moving back, we no longer spoke of unification in our family. I think we realised that it no longer seemed likely that South and North Korea would be unified anytime soon, given the current political and social climate – so we faced that truth head-on.

Unification feels so far away, yet Korea is very small. If you drive just two hours north from the main city of Seoul, you’re suddenly blocked by a wall. It’s so close, yet so far. I think science fiction, too, reflects things that may seem distant — but are closer than we think.

VOA: You shot The Fin yourself, capturing hauntingly decayed spaces. How did you go about choosing locations? How did you want these industrial, ghostlike settings to shape the emotional atmosphere of the film?

PS: We shot the film on a very tight budget, so I was mainly looking for cheap places to shoot. Ironically, the more run-down the locations were, the more expensive the rental fee was. I hated the fact that people were profiting from torn, worn-down, unsanitary locations and making loads of money by renting them to film productions. This didn’t fit with the mindset of filmmaking I was trying to stick to, so we kept looking and looking. My producers, assistant directors, and friends worked really hard to negotiate and find good locations.

I also shot in a lot of places I used to frequent when I was young—now unoccupied, forgotten, and abandoned – some of which are very dear to me. Others, we were simply very lucky to find.

The most important thing for me was not to see drugstores, cars, or convenience stores in the background. It’s getting harder and harder to find locations like these, and this is where the zoom lens came in handy – it also influenced the film’s telephoto POV

VOA: The film avoids the clean dystopian aesthetic we often see in genre cinema and leans into something more murky, grainy, and tactile. Can you talk about your visual language and how you approached creating a world that feels both lived-in and absent-minded?

PS: Most of the atmosphere of the film was realised in the post-production process. I worked extensively with a really talented colourist and sound designer, both of whom spent almost two years perfecting the tone, atmosphere, and mood of the film.

As for the grain, we simply did not have enough time or money to light properly on set. Later, in post-production, pushing up the shadows resulted in the polluted look of the film. I did not want to use any sort of digital enhancement or noise reduction, as that also felt wrong. I did not want to polish the film by making it clean or giving it a ‘high-production’ look, as we shot with so few means. It was important that the limits of the budget were reflected in the final image and that we present these aspects as strengths rather than weaknesses of the film.

VOA: The fishing store is such a rich, symbolic space. Was it inspired by a real place, and how did you work with your set and production designers to shape it into something so metaphorical?

PS: It’s an actual underground fishing store we shot in. We did little production design, as it was already very kitsch, dirty, and conveyed the nostalgia I wanted. You can find many fishing stores like these around Korea, hidden from sunlight. They cater to city dwellers who want to fish but cannot find enough time to drive to the sea, and so they cater to their desires in these shabby places. It was not a very sanitary place, and just the day after we shot there, I heard that the fishing store got torn down for construction—perhaps to build a PC room.

The fishing store was the most important part of the film for me. I wanted over half of the film to happen there. For me, it was a place of dead time – where time halts. There are no clocks, no windows, and not much happens except for nonsensical gambling and fishing. This idea of a dead place, where the story suddenly halts and we get to just sit back, maybe doze off – it really excited me. A lot of people wanted me to cut the length of the fishing store scenes. In response, I made them even longer [smiles].

VOA: There’s a sense of emotional residue in The Fin – as if it’s less about story and more about memory and feeling. Did you always intend to reject traditional narrative structure in favour of something more impressionistic?

SP: It’s never my intention. Since I’m working mostly off my own money or money that people offer out of the kindness of their hearts, I don’t need to cater to any sort of commercial filmmaking structure. This is nice on one hand, as it gives me freedom of expression, but on the other hand, since I’m not being safeguarded or watched by anyone, there is a sense that I need to be as objective as possible—meaning that I need to not stray too far into personal expression, where I drown in self-expression while losing the story and the audience. I try hard to find the balance between these two extremes.

The film was not made to ignore narrative conventions; instead, I tried really hard to keep to them—but in my own way.

VOA: You co-edited the film with Clémentine Decremps, Jiyoon Han, and Benjamin Mirguet. How did that collaboration shape the fragmented rhythm of the film?

PS: The post-production of this film took three years. I edited the first six months alone, Jiyoon helped with the next three, Benjamin for the following 3–5 months, and Clementine for the majority of the edit until the end. I’m very thankful to Clementine, especially as she and I were not in the same physical space during the last year of the film, yet she was very caring and attentive, as well as adding her unique charm and wit to the film. 

The film is not an easy one to edit. We have a looooot of scenes we cut out. A lot of the scenes and narrations you see in the final film were created during the editing process, revised, and then constantly revised. I struggled hard to feel a sense of control during the first two years, but during the last, I found my pace and rhythm and ways to keep control while working with a lot of people. This comes from starting the film completely alone – shooting it, editing it, producing it initially – and then gradually welcoming new collaborators over a long stretch of time.

VOA: Kim Pureum and Yeon Yeji bring intensity to their roles. What qualities were you looking for during casting?

PS: I wanted the two characters to look completely different, talk completely differently, and walk differently. Pureum, I met on a film set where I was the cinematographer. This was back when she was in middle school, three years before The Fin. She brought a lot of professionalism to our film set, as she started acting when she was seven. Pureum and Yeji don’t share many scenes together. In fact, there are only 1 or 2 shots where they are in the same shot, but even in these shots, their eyes don’t meet. In fact, most of their interaction is done with Goh Woo, who plays the messenger Omega. He is the middle ground and the ladder between them. A messenger, harbinger of sorts.

VOA: The Omegas are an eerie concept – mutated beings exploited for labour. Can you elaborate on what they represent to you within the film’s post-ideological world?

PS: They represent minorities. Especially in Korea, we have many minorities, whether ethnic or religious. A lot of foreign labourers work in harsh conditions, and many of the places they work in are located in the suburbs, near the outskirts of the country, by the seaside. 

Also, Korea is a country that is so concentrated on Seoul. Everyone wants to go to Seoul, live in Seoul, work in Seoul, study in Seoul, succeed in Seoul. This sort of capitalistic concentration on one city, to me, does not seem very healthy. Omega and the inner-wall city we portray in the film are less a futuristic world and concept than a reflection of the present.

VOA: You’ve mentioned influences like Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. What specifically about their filmmaking – in terms of time, space, or emotional ambiguity – spoke to you while making The Fin

PS: The ease of camera, the ease of the edit, the ease of temporality and spatial atmospheres in these directors’ works are always so fascinating to watch. They make it look so simple, yet there is so much tension and complexity in everything they do. This is what I strive to do. Do a hardass job but make it look simple.

VOA: The Fin feels like a meditation on what’s lost in the name of progress – connection, memory, nature. Were there particular events or anxieties, either personal or societal, that seeded this project for you?

PS: I wrote the script at the start of COVID. So much was happening, and so fast. My grandmother was one of the first people who died from the disease early on. Back then, the government did not have a proper way to deal with the dead or the time before and after death. All sorts of fear permeated everywhere – fear of contamination, death, the end of the world, the collapse of the economy, and society. I wrote this film in an attempt to understand this fear, as well as express how easy it is to be drenched in it – and also how important it is to fight it.

Written and interviewed by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Park Syeyoung

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