[HanCinema's Film Review] "Some Journey - A Citizen Created Musical"

If there's anything I dislike about film, it's that the format is too perfect. Countless editing and extra takes are such that movies are never really real so much as they are deliberately calculated to seem real. Modern theater, with its own brand of flash, goes along the same lines. But there is one genre of performance that manages to remain genuine, simply because of the lack of pretensions- community theater. All the people that happen to live in a nearby area get together to put on a show and generally have a fun time. And that's the story that's documented by "Some Journey - A Citizen Created Musical", the story of an Incheon community theater group and their efforts to put on a play.

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The immediate interesting part of "Some Journey - A Citizen Created Musical" is that it's not really a documentary in the sense that it's just people talking about the play. The bulk of the runtime is taken up by clips from the play itself. The picture presented is enough to give us a basic idea of the story. Drama unfolds at the airport. An old woman's dementia is involved. Many conversations about life are had, as well as songs.

These aren't especially deep conversations, but they're the kind of conversations you might have if forced to work together with a random stranger for an extended period of time. And on a philosophical level these are easy questions to ask ourselves, too. When was the last time you went on a vacation? Why don't you? How did you get to your current job? Are there any parts of it that seem rather ironic, given your original dreams in life?

What makes the contrast fun in the context of the musical is that they're a very clear joy of life flowing through the performances. Even if the cast members aren't all quite on a professional level, why should that be important? Think about it. The cardboard cut-out airport was never really convincing. The point of the play isn't to exhibit any kind of faux-realism. It's just to enjoy the play, as painstakingly simple as that might sound.

And this too is reflected quite well in the documentary portions, which are less about the technical factors involved in staging a community play and more about asking the performers and crew why they want to participate in a play in the first place. This answer likewise is a simple one- they want to enjoy themselves. They want to put on a show for other people. And this involvement itself, is just plain fun.

In this regard the broader appeal of "Some Journey - A Citizen Created Musical" is probably rather limited. To a fair extent we're not watching an actual movie so much as we are a behind-the-scenes special edition of a community musical that will mostly just be of interest to people in that community. "Some Journey - A Citizen Created Musical" is quite distinctly not really a film at all- and that's fine by me, because that's my secret irony. I'm a film critic who doesn't particularly like film all that much. Emotions are what I'm after, and the ones in this movie offer a fuzzy aftertaste.

Review by William Schwartz

"Some Journey - A Citizen Created Musical" is directed by Kim Jeong-wook-I