Where is the Paradise?

It is somewhere within, and someplace beyond.

Director’s Statement

I arrived in America in the fall of 2005 to commence my studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I remembered walking past the same homeless people everyday on my routine walk to school – the same faces, the same eyes, the same posture, the same words, and the same rejection. A self-detest builds up over time in me, a helplessness transferred from the gaze of these people.

The result is the conception of “Paradise”, based on a simple story of how a man, stabbed, robbed and left to die, was helplessly stripped of his clothes and belongings from strangers that walked past him. At the same time, in a white and empty room, a helpless babe was born into this world, whose very nature is drawn out by the witnessing of these traumatic events through the window. A wild violence took over him as he vented his accumulated aggression towards a plate of chicken fed to him. The fallen world mirrors the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the old testament, the inner hearts of man dark and sinful.