The girls’ journey to “the end of the world” takes the form of a day trip to Sincheon Station, the final stop on a train line out of Seoul. As the film progresses, the girls naturally find their pairings, and by the end, we get extended scenes between Siyeon and Yeonwoo together in a room, and Songhee and Sojung together in a separate room, before they all come back together in the same room (and frame) for the final scene. Their energetic play-fighting contrasts with Siyeon and Songhee’s friendly but cautious conversation as they navigate a burgeoning friendship. Even while we’re focusing on Siyeon and Songhee’s conversation, the other two girls are always visible. In one early scene in a gym, Siyeon and Songhee chat in the foreground of the frame, while Yeonwoo and Sojung are visible in the background through a glass wall, playing with punching bags. Through careful blocking, Kwon and Seo establish the girls as a tight-knit unit while also observing the dynamics between the individual girls within that group. The girls trek down a country road in Short Vacation. Kwon and Seo shoot most scenes with minimal coverage, allowing us to observe, mostly in wide shots, how the girls interact, whether that’s slumping over each other as they sleep on a train, or walking down the road in a close group. Siyeon, to a certain extent, acts as our point-of-view character, but Short Vacation is very much an ensemble film. Kwon and Seo mostly keep their camera stationary and at a distance, so the focus is on how the girls interact as a group, rather than picking any one of them out as a protagonist. While Siyeon is a stranger at the beginning of the film, the other girls will be baring their souls to her by the end, and she to them. Kwon and Seo capture how friendships between young people are often this fluid, especially as the girls aren’t quite old enough yet to be stuck in their ways or suspicious of newcomers. With that simple gesture, she’s one of them just a few scenes later, she’s hanging out and laughing with the girls as if they’ve been friends their whole lives. Siyeon quickly befriends the girls when one of them drops a contact lens on the floor, and Siyeon helps the group hunt for it by shining her phone light on the ground. We’re invited into the friendship between the girls in the photography club through the eyes of Siyeon, the new girl in class. After being verbally communicated with the directors, the actors acted spontaneously.” As a result, the four main characters - Siyeon (Seol Si-yeon), Yeonwoo (Bae Yeon-woo), Sojung (Park So-jung), and Songhee (Han Song-hee) - and their friendships with each other feels intimately real. The script only had guidelines for description of locations and situations instead of dialogues, which were intended for directors and staff. As the press notes describe, “In order to show these girls in a vivid way, we tried ‘taking’ the scene, not ‘making’. Although the story is fictional, each actress plays a character named after themselves, and their dialogue is largely improvised. Short Vacation gets the little things right about teen girl friendships, perhaps because the two male directors collaborated so closely with their young female stars, and gave them significant creative control. What is “the end of the world” to teenage girls whose primary concerns are hanging out with their friends and making sure they get home before curfew? Set mostly over one hot summer day, the intimidating vastness of life is contrasted against the mundane trivialities of these girls’ lives and their friendships. In Kwon Min-pyo and Seo Hansol’s Short Vacation, four thirteen-year-old girls are asked to photograph “the end of the world.” Or at least, that’s the prompt their photography club teacher gives them for summer homework. At Seventh Row, we pride ourselves on seeking out the best hidden gems that nobody’s talking about to ensure that our readers never miss a great film again.Ĭlick here to sign up for regular streaming recommendations of the best under-the-radar films. Berlinale Review: Teen girls search for the end of the world in Short Vacation. In Kwon Min-pyo and Seo Hansol’s Short Vacation, four thirteen-year-old girls set out to complete their summer photography assignment: photograph the end of the world.Ĭheck out all our Berlinale coverage.
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