Letter to an Unknown Mother: Affective Images, the Archive of Memory

Premiered at the 17^th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, CHO Jin-seok Cho’s Letter to an Unknown Mother transcends the conventions of observational documentary to become a full-fledged “essay film,” foregrounding the director’s own voice and philosophical reflection. Born in Korea and adopted overseas, Cho embarks on a search for his birth mother, documenting a journey that takes him through Japan, Portugal, and Spain. By weaving together the record of this personal quest and his intimate reflections on his mother into an essayistic form, the film positions itself as a distinctive work where private exploration and global inquiry converge.

Images and Landscapes of Complex Emotions

What governs Letter to an Unknown Mother is not speech but image: a succession of visual fragments in which longing, resentment, frustration, and tenderness coexist. From the opening sequence—mating insects, a baby crawling across a garden, adoption papers—the film constructs a montage that conjures a sense of rupture and loss rather than the promise of a new beginning. These images establish an affective landscape through which the director’s own conflicted emotions toward his mother resonate, guiding viewers into questions far deeper than those of a simple mystery. Although a private investigator provides information about the mother’s whereabouts, the film leaves its ending open, signaling that Cho is not chasing a solution but undertaking an urgent attempt to understand the circumstances and feelings that led to his mother’s decision. Throughout, his camera lingers on places and textures that absorb and refract this emotional complexity, inviting the audience to share in an empathetic reckoning shaped less by explanatory words than by the silent force of images and landscapes imbued with his layered state of mind.

From the Personal to the Global: Expanding the Archive

Through epistolary narration, incidental footage, and investigative records placed side by side, the film at first appears to be an intensely personal odyssey. Yet as it unfolds, it reveals itself as a far more intricate tapestry. Cho expands his own experience into a global framework, interlacing personal records with cinematic archives to map a world-historical terrain shaped by diaspora, war and division, and economic inequality.

The key instrument of this expansion is the film archive itself. Alongside his own images, Cho layers films by masters who have influenced him—Nagisa Ōshima, Pedro Costa, and Im Kwon-taek. Ōshima’s gaze on Korean youth in Japan, Costa’s ghostly portraits of migrants and urban poor, and Im’s Kilsodeum (1986), which crystallizes the wounds of The Korean war, division, and separation, all resonate with his journey. By weaving together private documentation and cinematic memory, Cho reframes personal trauma within the global coordinates of migration, violence, and survival, showing how the personal archive can become a critical device for recovering “omitted histories.”

Sound as Emotional Tapestry

Equally striking is the film’s meticulous sound design. In contrast to the functional audio common in documentaries, its music and soundscape delicately mirror the director’s emotions and the passage of time, amplifying the emotional and symbolic meanings of the images onscreen. At times sound substitutes for what remains unsaid; at others it transforms Cho’s lived emotions and temporal experience into an aural tapestry. This sonic dimension deepens the film’s audiovisual texture, marking a key aesthetic distinction from conventional nonfiction and creating a sensory channel through which viewers can more fully inhabit the director’s personal journey.

An Ethics of Vulnerability and a Space of Resonance

The power of Letter to an Unknown Mother lies in its quiet faith in the affective and ethical potential of images and sound. Cho neither manipulates his materials nor imposes definitive answers; instead, he exposes his wounds and uncertainties while listening attentively to the stories of others. This approach embodies what might be called an ethics of vulnerability—a refusal to conceal one’s own fragility, to objectify others, or to force emotions and memories into a single conclusion. By leaving space for viewers to resonate in their own ways, the film becomes less a transmission of arguments than a resonant chamber in which past and present, self and other, can speak to one another.

As the pain of an abandoned son, the predicament of a mother compelled to migrate, and the trauma of war and separation shared by Koreans intertwine within a global circulation, audiences are invited to think beyond one man’s biography toward larger questions of “nation and individual,” “migration and memory.”

Ultimately, the film demonstrates that personal archives and global canons, private intimacy and historical consciousness, need not stand in opposition. By bringing together individual experience and collective history, affective images and cinematic citation, Letter to an Unknown Mother charts a path toward both depth and breadth. It stands as a compelling example of how contemporary Korean documentary can be rooted in personal experience while articulating a genuinely cosmopolitan vision.

By Oh Young-Suk
Edited by Savina Petkova
Copyright FIPRESCI