House of Hummingbird 벌새 (2018), Directed by Kim Bora
An awkward teenager’s coming of age in 1994, Seoul, South Korea.
Wow, this has quickly become one of my favorite movies ever since I watched it. It took awhile to come out with English subtitles, but I waited patiently for it.
It caught my eye originally because of the award circuits; it won about sixty awards globally, and the biggest one was the Grand Prix at the Berlin Film Festival and best global feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. This was about the same time as Parasite was coming out in the West, so it’s interesting to see the trajectory of this movie, which was made by a woman and relatively new filmmaker, to the success of Bong Joon-ho’s global masterpiece.
This is a very quiet film, which I enjoyed very much. It shows how we’re in the head of the main character quite a bit, and adds a depth of loneliness to her life. It’s a quiet life, one where she’s navigating new hardships, relationships, and her family’s own struggle with the world and economic expectations.
It’s a really heartwarming story, one that I found so inspiring that I sat down and wrote poems about girlhood about immediately after watching it. While it may not be as well known in the Western cinema world, I think it deserves to be up there with the films about adolescence, because it truly crosses borders and experiences while still distinctly being a very Korean experience.
Let’s break down what makes this film so magical.
Plot / Story / Writing
We get extremely comfortable with our main protagonist, fourteen-year-old Eun-hee, because the camera never leaves her. For almost all of the time with footage, she’s never not in the story or shot. This is purely about Eun-hee’s story largely as she navigates being fourteen years old, when as a girl it’s a kind of strange time of being in-between.
And Eun-hee is very clearly in-between life stages. Her parents own a rice-cake shop, she has a boyfriend who she innocently kisses in corridors, and her father wants her to do better. The men in her family are abusive, hitting her, her mother, and her sister.
Her friend, who she goes to Chinese class with, ditches her, leaving her rather friendless on the path of life. The new Chinese teacher, a young woman who seems to be a role model for Eun-hee, notices that she isn’t doing so well in the language.
She becomes a guide for life, of sorts, to help Eun-hee navigate the world and its hardship. By the end of the film, the teacher disappears, going somewhere none of us know. Perhaps she’s going to help another lost girl somewhere—that’s the idea I like a lot.
As a history buff, there’s a lot of backdrop to this film. Kim Il-sung dies, her sister, who goes over the Seongsu Bridge every day to go to school, cannot be found when the Seongsu Bridge collapses (a real event that happened), South Korea is still recovering from the brutal dictatorships it found itself under until the mid-90s.
This is a bit longer film, but trust me it’s worth it. It might drag at some parts, but I find it’s because it’s so realistic. Life, at times, is often slow, and not a lot seems to happen. Quite a bit of this is normal life for Eun-hee, minus a couple of extraordinary circumstances, and it’s beautiful how we, as viewers, are granted this opportunity to follow the character around at such depth.
Cinematic Elements
For context, I’m a major fan of Sofia Coppola’s style of filming people and spaces, and oh my god this movie hit right up my alley in terms of cinematography. It was up there with the dreamy quality of a Coppola film, but also uniquely Kim Bora’s style.
Some of my favorite shots are really simple, whether it’s just Eun-hee sitting on the bus and gazing outside, or its a shot of the murky, dusty apartment complexes of Seoul at night. It evokes this feeling of nostalgia for old Seoul, before it became so industrialized, and before Korean became the modernized country we know today. Lots of natural lighting in this film, minus the indoor scenes where we have lamps and whatnot providing light onto the character’s faces.
The sound. This film is intentionally quiet and I absolutely loved it. We can hear the croak of cicadas, listen the trampoline bounce up and down with the weight of the girls, hear the traffic in the distance. It really adds depth to the experience, like I mentioned in the introduction.
Characters
There was?? A questionably??? Gay subplot?? I was screaming when this happened in the film, because I would’ve loved if this were a a coming of age and Eun-hee got to explore her sexuality as well.
I have a bit of understanding of Korean culture, having lived there and lived with a host family, completely immersed in it, but for me, this rung some bells in my radar because I genuinely thought this film was going to go that route. Maybe it’s a cultural difference—if someone Korean is reading this, please correct me.
Eun-hee is a very resilient child, despite her young age. She faces abuse by her family, is cut off by a dear friend, and isn’t the best at school.
She’s an excellent artist, although one might think of her as a failure if she goes down that career path. Looking this film up, I found it quite fascinating that this was an autobiographical script; Kim Bora modeled this film after her own childhood. Perhaps that’s why there’s this feeling of nostalgia evoked throughout, because this is Kim’s childhood in a sense.
The girl who plays Eun-hee is absolutely amazing. I want to keep seeing her in the Korean cinema world for sure.
Overall Thoughts
Watch House of Hummingbird. It’s slow and long, but it’s a beautiful snapshot into a young girl’s coming of age. I can’t wait to see what Kim Bora comes up with next because this was such a good debut. It’s hard to make a viewer care about your characters, but the tenderness, kindness, and devotion she put onto Eun-hee made her so memorable, one who we’re rooting for as she grows up to be an intelligent and resilient young woman.
