Title: Muljil: Diving
Foreign Title:
Year: 2025
Country: South Korea
Language: In Korean with English subtitles
Awards:
Director: Young Eun Yoo (Yooye)
There are hundreds of documentaries about people struggling to secure the most basic, universally accepted necessities of life, food, water and shelter. This is not one of them… Well, not quite.
It’s about 77-year-old Yang Young-sam’s melancholy farewell to the sea that has nourished her not only with sea cucumber, urchins, and abalone but also with a way of life.
She is just one of the generations of “haenyeo” (think wet suit, face mask, flippers, hold-your-breath diving) of Jeju Island, South Korea, who dive as many as six hours a day, approximately 18 days per month, for years, for decades, always depending on the weather and tide conditions. In 2014, nine haenyeo died while diving. And these women divers continue to be a big community.
Actually, what piqued my curiosity was whether Young Eun Yoo’s directorial debut was indeed, as she writes of her aims, ‘challenging conventions and exploring new ways to push the boundaries of the documentary genre.’ Consequently, she begins with a poem about the poetry of this way of life:
“A sound long held inside me
The sound that bursts forth when breath shatters at its edge
Sumbi-Sori”
(Sumbisori is the whistling sound haenyeo make when they surface.)
From the physical labour of sitting on a rock at dawn to wash out her mask from fogging to the symbolic gestures wrapped in the dusk, folded with care, tied with spider cord, to the long, long looks of longing when Yang Young-sam casts her gift to the Dragon King into the dark sea with the words, “Thank you for watching over me all these decades. “I’m leaving now,” Young Eun Yoo decides that it would simply be best to leave her heart’s work with a shout-out to Tony Bennett.
You had to be there.
