Onsan: Old Futures II

Onsan is located in the south of Ulsan metropolitan city, Korea. The landscapes of Onsan National Industrial Complex and surrounding villages are oddly in a tangle. The residents’ life disorderly holds embodied traumas and immense personal changes as their hometowns disappeared in the time of state-dominated industrialization and the capitalist system has been reconstructing the trajectories of their lives. Here are the memories and the present of these small townspeople who are only occasionally remembered as ‘Onsan-disease’, the first publicly documented pollution-related disease in the country.

Jisu Klaire Yoo

YOO conducts media research and creative works based on documentaries. She continues her media work through a wide spectrum of projects, from film editing and documentary directing to research-based installation works. Several of her film projects, including Daughters of the Cloth (2000/director), Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003/editor), Great Contract: Paju, Book, City (2021/editor), Time of Seeds (2022/editor) and more, have been shown at the festivals worldwide, such as Vancouver Int’l Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival, Jeonju Int’l Film Festival, DMZ Int’l Documentary Festival, etc. YOO teaches film production at Yong In University in Korea.