Mission Statement

“Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain,” Lucretius claimed. “The only certain thing is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain.” I conceived this film as an image-translation of a sort of imperceptible violence - the violence of the landscape, of the horizons. The quiet transgressive force called uncertainty, and the beauty and poetry of finding oneself at its mercy.

From Michelangelo Antonioni's L'AVVENTURA

The Story

Movement takes place on a surreal, empty vacuum of a desert land, with nothing but a straight dirt road stretching endlessly. A boy and a girl meet on the road, each of their intentions, their goals, unknown to the other. The boy is reticent, albeit resolute. The girl is more experienced, but jaded. They form a union in this rendezvous and walk together towards the end of the road, in the hopes of finding what they want there. They walk and talk, not even knowing for certain which way is forward and which way is backward, and not knowing if “the end” really exists. Logic tells them they need to get to the end, but the mysteries of one another and of this journey, and the infinite, indifferent landscapes swaddle them like a monstrous irony. We know nothing about these people, where they come from, or where they’re bound to be, as much as they know nothing. The central metaphor of this conceit is a movement that only highlights the stillness of it, and moving images that acquiesce their filmic space to introspection. Many questions loom at large and haunt the film. Will they get to the end? Will they find what they’re looking for? What are they looking for? Who are they? Do they even know? In this world, the biggest, the most devastating mystery of all is the mystery of the self. 

From Philippe Garrel’s LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS

What We Need

Most of our cast and crew are my friends who have volunteered to help realize my vision. We’ve come together to create something we feel is greater than all of us, and I will owe this film to their sincere goodwill and talent. 

However, needless to say the production is not possible without an ample sum of money to cover various costs, from the cost of an airbnb near the desert for 4 days to transportation, food, equipment rentals, props, etc. Below is a quick breakdown of the budget.

- Food, Transportation & Lodging - $1400 - To accomodate crew & cast during 4-shooting days in the desert 

- Camera and G&E Equipment - $1200 - Including Camera equipment, Lights, and Generators

- Production Design - $100 - Costumes, set dressings, props necessary for the film

- Fees - $300 - Indiegogo and Festival fees to share the vision of the film to audiences

- Total - $3,000

Extra money raised will go towards paying the crew & cast!

Donors can enjoy exclusive perks as well, based on their varying levels of contribution. This can range from being credited as an executive producer to receiving a copy of the lined script with notes to getting other special gifts…

From John Ford’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Director’s Statement

The aforementioned quote by Lucretius was once re-purposed by Michelangelo Antonioni, in his famous Cannes interview in 1960. He added: “What Lucretius said of his time is still a disturbing reality, for it seems to me that this uncertainty is very much of our time.” The realization of these two artists suggests that uncertainty may be, and increasingly so, the impervious thread that weaves through our time as well. At least it’s a reality that I have felt in my life. As an average boy in Korea and an immigrant boy in America, weighed down by the vacuous lands harboring me, by the empty spectacle of the fast changing world - it seemed that uncertainty was, and is, stored everywhere around me, in me.

Unlike any other art forms, Cinema is all movement, an image of movement itself. Perhaps the most certain of all arts is cinema, as both a marker of motion, momentum, and meaning, as well as a rejection of stasis. This fact of the medium, the innate empowerment it gives to the image and narrative, is what gives it its universal value. Yet the likes of Antonioni, Resnais, Akerman, Ozu, Duras, Bresson have championed in their films this uncertainty, illuminating a reality whose vividness and power lie in the mystery that precedes, and supercedes, any conventional filmic explanation.

How could a nucleus of certainty be replaced with uncertainty in the cinema medium? How could an image be made to embody the disappearance of things over appearance and assurance? Could such violent denunciations of meaning be the point of cinema, not the antithesis? I find it imperative now more than ever to ask these questions, to practice a cinema of unanswerable questions predicated in our existence. Years of film school had taught me that a good cinema is one that is logical. Logic is like a drug we take daily to numb us from discontents and irregularities. The idea that A causes B, which causes C which causes D. This is the ideology of maths and sciences. But life’s complexities and ambivalences often reject the easy equation of cause and effect, and art must be true to life. Consider, that A causes B, but B may have caused A, and C just happens arbitrarily, and D makes A null, or makes it full, depending on how you’d like to see it. To a comfortable mind expecting answers to line up perfectly, uncertainty is like a violence. We are pathologically wired to champion things we can easily understand. But the most peculiar, visceral, and therefore valuable human emotions occur as a reaction to the things and feelings we don’t quite understand. Logic gives us security, while uncertainty makes us go astray in our emotions, knocks at our subconscious and affects us for a hopelessly long time. After all, when we can finally accept that things are not so understandable by logic, wouldn’t we be able to truly understand each other by our feelings?

I’ve conceived this film initially as my thesis film at USC film school, but now I’ve dropped out, partly because I learned that what money buys you in these institutions is not in the best interest of making art. I subscribe to the notion that every moment in a film can be a part of a dialectic. Every choice in a film can be a sort of statement, a part of a thinking cinema, an organic creature. I wrote Movement, not simply as an exercise in narrative construct that represents the reality of uncertainty and its undercurrents of feelings but because I wanted to prove the potency of cinema medium wherein its unfolding elements can be fated towards a friction with the audience, towards a dialectic. 

I believe not only that it is imperative for me now to make this film, but that it is imperative for a film like this to be funded and garnered, in a world where it’s getting increasingly difficult for a challenging film carrying challenging ideas through formal and aesthetic gestures to exist. The current film industry would prime you for a mechanical reproduction, of ideas, of language, of forms, of consciousness… and everyone can tell their own stories insofar as they tell it the same way. It’d be important to know that there is a space for films like this, which takes kindly the hopeless reality we feel entangled to. Everything I’ve learned about the language of cinema tells me that it deserves it.

From Michelangelo Antonioni’s LA NOTTE

Other Ways You Can Help

If you want to support this film in different ways, please spread the word. Word of mouth has been a great tool in receiving more support and reaching a larger audience. We need as many people as possible to help in order to see this film be made. Tell your friends and family about Movement!