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Empty House
빈 집
A video diary shot in a single day, Empty House unfolds in two parts. The first, dominated by blue tones, observes ordinary morning rituals—waking, moving through the bathroom, hanging a mirror. The second, saturated in yellow, turns to compulsive eating, evoking both bodily obsession and the impulse to flee the body itself.
Bio Gina Kim
Gina Kim is a filmmaker and professor at UCLA. Her work spans narrative cinema and immersive media, engaging questions of historical memory, gender, and the ethics of representation. Her films include Never Forever (2007), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Final Recipe (2014), which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Her immersive works—Bloodless (2017), Tearless (2021), and Comfortless (2023)—form a trilogy addressing the history of U.S. military camp town women in South Korea.
The film juxtaposes containment, order, and banality with obsession, desire, and an explosive tendency for self-destruction. The ‘diary’ depicts the violent fracture of the female subject ‘I’. One constantly waits for the letter that never arrives, for the menstrual period that arrives late, and the self-fulfillment of the perfect body that is never satiated. And the other, exhausted from the wait, disperses into the self-effacement of depression, eating disorder, and PMS, transmuting an endless sound of obsessive eating and images of hopeless defect. The representation of the body—registered entirely through fragmented body parts—anchors the fulcrum of the ‘self’ and enunciates a feminist language of corporeal cinema.
In Empty House, space is defined by light, illuminating the solitude that inhabits us all.