A photograph of a young woman posing in a swimsuit with her friends at Dadaepo beach in the 1980s might not seem important, but for South Korean filmmaker Mokya Shin, it changed the direction of Easter, his first feature documentary. The woman in the photograph was Saekja, now 68, who had spent much of her younger life performing in Seoul’s transgender clubs at a time when people like her were regularly subjected to police raids, public humiliation and discrimination. Shin met her in Itaewon in 2022, expecting to hear another difficult story about surviving in a society that refused to accept transgender people, but Saekja had much more to tell him.
Born in 1995, Shin is a Seoul-based filmmaker and artist who previously worked as a journalist and creative producer at Vice Media APAC and is completing an MFA in Documentary at the Korea National University of Arts. His earlier work includes the short documentaries Archiving Men (2023) and Footprints of an Invisible Man Walking on Sand (2024), while his filmmaking has frequently dealt with people and experiences that receive little attention in mainstream society. With Easter, which had its world premiere at FIDMarseille in 2026, where it received a Special Mention in the First Film Competition and the High School Award, Shin takes a rather unusual approach to documentary filmmaking. Instead of relying entirely on interviews and archive material, he brings together Saekja’s recollections, staged scenes, dance, Buddhist mythology and the presence of a young man played by Lim Jin-hyo, letting the past to become something the characters can revisit rather than simply discuss.
There is also a much larger history behind Easter, especially when we consider how little is widely known about the transgender women who worked in South Korea’s entertainment districts during the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the clubs where they performed have disappeared, while the records that remain often say more about how the authorities treated them than about who they actually were. Saekja remembers her friends Suji and Kkangja not because of what happened to them at the hands of the police, but because one was a wonderful dancer and the other had an extraordinary singing voice. For Shin, those memories matter just as much as the more painful accounts, especially in a country where LGBTQ+ people continue to face discrimination despite becoming more visible in popular culture. As Easter is screened at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, View of the Arts speaks with Mokya Shin about meeting Saekja, the decision to combine documentary with fiction, Buddhist stories of transformation, the meaning of beauty and the importance of preserving the memories of people whose stories have seldom been heard.
View of the Arts: Saekja has lived an extraordinary life, from performing as a cabaret star during the early years of South Korea’s transgender nightlife to looking back on those experiences at 68. When you first met her, what was it about Saekja herself, rather than simply her history, that made you realise you wanted to build a film around her?
Mokya Shin: I met Saekja in 2022 in Itaewon, Seoul (Most trans clubs and bars are in this area) while researching the film. After six years as a video journalist, I thought I knew how these encounters went: someone tells you the hardest parts of their life, and you leave with a story. Saekja didn’t let it go that way. She opened her photo albums and showed me a picture of herself in a swimsuit at Dadaepo beach in the ’80s, posing with her friends.
Then she told me: “I don’t fit the rules of this world. I’ve lived my whole life breaking them, but we made our own world.” What stayed with me was the word we. She wasn’t a tragic exception. She was the keeper of a world that a whole trans community had built in a country that refused to see them. I didn’t want to make a film about her. I wanted her to guide me into that world.
VOA: “Easter” moves between documentary and fiction so beautifully that there are moments when it becomes difficult to tell where Saekja’s memories end and your own interpretation of them begins. Why did you feel that a straightforward documentary would not have been enough to tell her story, and what did fiction allow you to express that reality alone perhaps could not?
MS: For most of her life, Saekja was expected to prove that she was real, living through a time when the police regularly raided transgender clubs and when a judge even sentenced her and her friends to three days’ detention for being “men who wore makeup and sold drinks”, while newspapers treated them as curiosities rather than people with their own lives and experiences. I felt that making a conventional documentary would mean asking her to do the same thing all over again, to provide evidence of who she was and what she had been through.
Besides, almost everything she remembers has disappeared, including the yeogwan room in Donam-dong where she underwent surgery outside a hospital, a place that can no longer be filmed as part of her past but can be revisited through reconstruction. So we returned to a yeogwan room, where Saekja spoke as though she were back on that particular night, reassuring her younger self with the words, “Saekja, you’ve made the right decision.” Fiction let her stand inside her past instead of testifying about it. If the world insisted on calling her a fiction, I wanted to use fiction to make her undeniable.
VOA: The young man played by Lim Jin-hyo gradually becomes an intriguing presence in the film, almost as though Saekja is encountering a younger version of herself across time. How did you imagine the relationship between these two figures, and did you want us to understand him literally as part of her past, or more as someone who carries the emotions and memories of the person she once was?
MS: He began as my alter ego: someone who arrives in a world that isn’t his, asking questions, never sure he has the right to be there. As we filmed, he became closer to the Buddha’s disciples, who memorised the teachings and passed them on by word of mouth. He receives her story and holds it in his body. At the trans club Yeobo, he clears the tables in exactly the same posture as Saekja, as if learning her gestures before her words.
I find the “younger self” reading moving, and I don’t want to close it off. But at sixteen, when Saekja left home for Busan, she wasn’t a young man waiting to become her. She was already herself. What she lacked was a world that would let her be. So he isn’t her former body. He’s closer to an heir.
VOA: Saekja speaks very openly about ageing, beauty, love and the particular pain of relationships in which transgender women can be desired privately but ultimately abandoned for what she calls “authentic women”. These are painful memories, yet you never seem interested in reducing her life to suffering. How did you find the balance between acknowledging what she has endured and allowing her humour, confidence and personality to remain at the centre of the film?
MS: When Saekja talks about men who desired her privately and then left for what she calls “authentic women”, she doesn’t ask for pity. So I didn’t want the film to ask for it on her behalf. My principle in the edit was simple: don’t look away from the pain to protect the audience, and don’t linger on it to move them. Let her finish her sentence, including the joke at the end.
VOA: Buddhist stories and mythology run quietly through “Easter”, including the story of the merchants who encounter the rakshasas, and these passages begin to take on different meanings when placed alongside Seokja’s memories of gender, desire and survival. What drew you to these particular stories, and how did you decide which parts of Buddhist mythology could speak to her life without making the connection too direct?
MS: Buddhist scripture moves freely between different times, places and bodies, and in the Jataka tales, the Buddha is said to have lived countless previous lives, appearing as a deer, a monkey, a merchant and even a white horse. The story we follow in the film comes from one of these tales, in which a group of shipwrecked merchants find themselves on an island inhabited by rakshasa women, known as yachanyeo, female monsters who seduce and devour men, until a white horse, representing the Buddha, arrives to carry away those who wish to escape. However, in the Lotus Sutra, Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva who saves all beings, can appear in whatever form is needed to help someone, including that of a yacha, which means that the very creature people regard as a monster could actually be the one who saves them.
That reversal was particularly important to me because Saekja and her friends had spent so much of their lives being called perverts and monsters, and I wanted to challenge those attitudes through Buddhist stories in which bodies can change form and identities are not restricted by the boundaries people usually place around them. For me, there is something deeply connected to transgender experience in that freedom to exist in different forms, and I felt that Buddhist mythology offered a way of exploring those ideas without having to explain everything directly.
At the same time, I wanted the connection between the Buddhist stories and Saekja’s life to remain subtle, which is why the young man reads the story aloud almost like a spell, allowing the mythology to exist alongside her memories rather than using it to explain who she is. What mattered to me was creating a world in which Saekja was no longer seen as the monster in somebody else’s story, but could simply exist as herself.
VOA: There is a beautiful line in the film when Saekja says, “To be natural without pretence is the most beautiful thing.” Coming from someone whose life has involved performance, transformation and being looked at by other people, those words carry a lot of weight. Did that idea of what it means to be “natural” become more complicated for you while making the film?
MS: Yes. “Unnatural” is the oldest accusation against trans people, and Saekja’s body is, quite literally, something she made. So when she says that being natural without pretence is the most beautiful thing, she can’t mean “as you were born”. I think she means unguarded, not hiding. Her naturalness is something she built, which is exactly why it is hers.
It also turned the question back on me. “Just be natural” is something I’ve said countless times to people in front of my camera. Making Easter, I realised how strange that request is for someone who has been looked at all her life. In the dressing room, after changing into her stage dress, she looks at herself in the mirror with a nervousness that decades of performing haven’t erased. That, to me, is natural. Not the absence of performance, but the person still there inside it.
VOA: Saekja belongs to a generation that lived through a period of South Korean queer and transgender history that younger people may know very little about, and throughout the film she remembers people, relationships and spaces that have disappeared with time. Were you thinking about “Easter” partly as a way of keeping those memories alive, or was it more important to allow Saekja to look back at her past on her own terms rather than asking her to represent an entire generation?
MS: It was important to me that Saekja could look back on her life in her own way, because she never spoke as though she were representing an entire generation, but instead remembered particular people she had known and loved, including two of her transgender colleagues, Suji and Kkangja, who do not appear in the film but whom she still remembers very clearly. She talks about how beautiful Suji was and how wonderfully she could perform both traditional and modern dance, while Kkangja had an incredible singing voice, and she also remembers the friend she was closest to, someone who has since disappeared from her life. What struck me was that Saekja never spoke about these women simply as victims of discrimination or mistreatment, but remembered their personalities, their talents and the things that made each of them special.
When you look at the official records from that period, much of what remains of Saekja’s friends is a newspaper photograph showing them standing outside a police station with their heads bowed, which tells us very little about who these women actually were or the lives they had together. I wanted to create a different kind of record, one that came from Saekja’s own voice and memories, where her friends could be remembered for the people they were rather than simply for how society treated them.
That is also what the title “Easter” means to me, because I see it as a way of bringing back a part of history that has been forgotten or left out, allowing those memories and the people within them to exist again. I never wanted Saekja to feel that she had to speak for an entire generation of transgender women, because that was never the purpose of the film; what mattered to me was allowing her to remember the people she loved, so that their names could be spoken again by someone who had actually known and cared for them.
Written and interviewed Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of BFI LFF
Director wishes to keep a low profile; therefore, we didn’t upload his image.
View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.
