Return to the origin

The film tells a life with no dialogue at all, through the metamorphosis of matter alone. A frozen wave puts out branches like frost and becomes a nerve, and the embers loosened from the knots of that nerve become stars, move toward one another, burn, cool and become stars again. A single thread strings the scattered light, bends like a river, reaches the ground as a root, becomes the vein of a leaf, becomes a wound, and what comes loose from the wound swims through the dark, stops and opens as a flower. Then a hand appears. A hand spread wide toward the light, shaped exactly like the flower at full bloom. To be alive may be no more than this one gesture, the going toward full bloom. In Korean, the word for dying is the word for going back. Not disappearing and not departing, but returning to where one already was. "Return to the origin" is the shape of that word. A circle that comes out of the dark before birth, passes through a life and returns to the same dark. When the circle closes, what is left to us is not the weight of death but the sharpness of being alive right now.