Sun is a 10-year old girl who feels deeply uncomfortable at school. The other girls in class, particularly top student Bora, are mean to her, and there’s no one she can count on to be her friend. But soon after the start of summer vacation, she happens to meet Jia, another girl the same age who has just moved into her neighborhood.
Jia is smart and resourceful, and she and Sun quickly become friends. Jia seems reluctant to invite Sun to her place, where she lives alone with her grandmother, but the two of them spend a lot of time at Sun’s home, sometimes watching over her younger brother. For the space of a summer, Sun feels content and relieved at having found a good friend.
But things change when school re-starts, and Jia joins Sun’s class. Now Jia has to find her place within the social circles at school, and new pressures are placed on their friendship. Jia also joins one of the after-school study institutes where so many Korean middle and upper class students receive extra instruction, but Sun’s family can’t afford it. This introduces another kind of distance between them, and in the coming months, Sun and Jia’s friendship will be tested in ways that they never expected.
Yoon Ga-eun’s debut feature, coming on the heels of two highly acclaimed, award-winning shorts Guest (2011) and Sprout (2013), is appropriately titled. The World of Us does not present the lives of its young protagonists from the perspective of a nostalgic adult looking back on childhood. Instead, it depicts the complicated emotions of these girls with such nuance and intimacy that we feel pulled into their world.
Since the director treats Sun’s anxiety and Jia’s insecurity with total seriousness and respect, we too come to think of them more as equals than of children with limited life experience. At the same time, we also feel how the weaknesses and troubles of the parents end up pressing down on the girls’ lives.
For a film like this to really work, it needs the vision and passion of the director but also a good deal of talent from the young cast. The actresses who play Sun (Choi Soo-in), Jia (Seol Hye-in) and Bora (Lee Seo-yeon) are not the sort of highly trained, professional child actors that you see in many Korean films these days.
None of them had previously acted in a film of this scale, but director Yoon managed through extensive rehearsals and some clever techniques to draw out highly natural performances from the girls. Each of the three protagonists are as fully developed and nuanced as the adult characters in other films. Choi Soo-in in particular projects a delicate but resilient emotional core that makes Sun a fascinating character.
Director Yoon has also shown a good feel for space and community in her films. Shot in various neighborhoods in northern Seoul, the film’s setting is not particularly special, but it ends up being memorable because of the naturalistic way it’s presented. At no time does it feel like a location or set is meant to project a certain atmosphere; instead, it just feels convincing.
Sometimes people use the term “small film” to describe works shot on this scale, and while it’s true that this is a film about small children, there’s nothing small about the emotions and ambitions of this work. It’s a truthful film, that contains some insight for viewers of any age.
And it tells its story with both elegance and intelligence. Movies like this don’t come around often. The World of Us is a quiet triumph.