| The Weight | |||||||||||||
| Native Name: |
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| Director: | Jeon Kyu-hwan | ||||||||||||
| Starring: | Cho Jae-hyun Park Ji-a | ||||||||||||
| Music: | Ju Dae-gwan | ||||||||||||
| Cinematography: | Kim Nam-gyun | ||||||||||||
| Editing: | Kim Mi-yeong Park Hae-oh | ||||||||||||
| Producer: | Kim Woo-taek Choi Min-ae | ||||||||||||
| Distributor: | Next Entertainment World | ||||||||||||
| Runtime: | 108 minutes | ||||||||||||
| Country: | South Korea | ||||||||||||
| Language: | Korean | ||||||||||||
The Weight is a 2012 South Korean film about a hunchback mortician and his transgender stepsister.
It made its world premiere in the Venice Days sidebar of the 69th Venice International Film Festival,[1] [2] [3] where it won the 2012 Queer Lion, an award for the "best film with a homosexual and queer culture theme."[4] It is the first Korean film to have won the prize.[5] [6] It also won a Special Award at the 2013 Fantasporto Orient Express Awards.[7] Jeon Kyu-hwan was awarded Best Director at the 16th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival,[8] [9] [10] and the Silver Peacock award for best director at the International Film Festival of India.[11] Cho Jae-hyun won Best Actor at the 2013 Fantasia Festival.[12] [13] [14]
Most of director Jeon Kyu-hwan's previous films, including Berlinale-featured Varanasi and Dance Town, have dealt with the underbelly of society. The Weight is his fifth feature-length film.[15]
Jung is the mortician at the morgue who has to heavily rely on medicine for his severe tuberculosis and arthritis. Despite his illness, cleansing and dressing the dead is a noble and even beautiful work to him. Jung is the last living person who silently takes care of the dead. So for him, his life at the morgue is both a reality and a fantasy while the corpses are his models and friends for his paintings, his sole living pleasure.
Born with a hunchback and left at an orphanage, Jung was adopted by a woman who hid him away in the attic only to use him as a child slave for her dress shop. The woman's own child Dong-bae is younger than Jung; she has always wanted to become a woman, loathing her own male body. While Jung feels affection and sympathy for his younger stepsister, he feels burdened by Dong-bae's struggles. Under the weight of life and death carried by the dead bodies that he faces each day coupled with his love-hate relationship with Dong-bae, Jung endures the pain and thirst that he feels like a camel crossing a desolate desert in silence. Then he quietly prepares his biggest, his last gift for his sister.