2024 | 80 MIN l Documentary

DIRECTOR HONG Daye

SALES D.O.Cinema (docinema.kr@gmail.com)

Saving a Dragonfly is a documentary by director HONG Daye, who has documented her life since her high school years in 2014. The film candidly portrays the internal and external conflicts between herself, her family, and her friends during the college entrance exam period. The word "candid" here is not just a description. The film reveals uncomfortable truths: a school that turns a blind eye to a student’s death, parents crying like children while conversing with their child, wrists full of self-harm scars. Saving a Dragonfly relentlessly exposes the wounds that everyone preferred to hide. It seemed that once she became a university student, all these wounds would turn into scars of glory, but the reality was quite different. Even after entering the university of her dreams and reaching her mid-to-late 20s, the director continues to struggle with relationships, the pressures of social systems, and deeper existential questions about life and death. As death, once spoken of jokingly, gradually became a grim reality, the director decides to write a letter to her friend, expressing everything she had never said. She resolves to pour all her emotions into this film. Saving a Dragonfly compresses and releases years of accumulated, high-purity emotions with an intense rhythm and immersion. As one character says, it starkly conveys the "shame of feeling like my reality has been fully exposed," delivering an almost painfully honest (anti-)coming-of-age story.