Caroline Key
Kyung-Mook Kim

Co-Presented by:
Images Festival
Whippersnapper Gallery
April 7 – 24, 2016

Looping Daily from outside from 8 PM – 4 AM
Screenings: Thursday-Saturday, at 1 PM, 3 PM and 5 PM (Runtime: 62 min)
Opening reception: April 14, 7 – 9 PM
Panel Discussion: April 16, 4 PM. Rm 284, OCADU. 100 McCaul St.

Combining documentary with experimental video, Grace Period documents the activities of female sex workers in the Yeongdeungpo red-light district in Seoul, South Korea.

Facing constant police crackdowns and the threat of permanent closure following the opening of a massive shopping complex adjacent to their workplaces, the women of Yeongdeungpo band together in protest. Archival footage, mostly shot by the women themselves, shows their collective efforts as they organize with other sex workers from brothels across the country. In creative and daring acts of resistance, they launch a series of demonstrations that trace a lineage to Korea’s democratic union movements of the 1980s–denouncing the government and corporate interests, demanding decriminalization, and declaring their rights as workers.

Careful to avoid portraying the women with unwanted stigma, the filmmakers utilize digital effects to visually emphasize their working conditions. This rotoscoping effect took the efforts of four animators, working over the span of a full year, to create by digitally tracing and animating the workers’ figures frame by frame. The results are flickering silhouettes designed to protect the privacy of the women, while underscoring their status as precarious workers.

Together these scenes of activism and labour work in tandem to reveal the specificities of these workers’ struggles within ubiquitous conditions of debt, caring labour, the gendering of that labour, and institutional and state violence.