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2012 South Korean film From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Weight (Korean: 무게; RR: Muge) is a 2012 South Korean film about a hunchback mortician and his transgender stepsister.
| The Weight | |
|---|---|
| |
| Hangul | 무게 |
| Revised Romanization | Muge |
| McCune–Reischauer | Muge |
| Directed by | Jeon Kyu-hwan |
| Written by | Jeon Kyu-hwan |
| Produced by | Kim Woo-taek Choi Min-ae |
| Starring | Cho Jae-hyun Park Ji-a |
| Cinematography | Kim Nam-gyun |
| Edited by | Kim Mi-yeong Park Hae-oh |
| Music by | Ju Dae-gwan |
| Distributed by | Next Entertainment World |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 108 minutes |
| Country | South Korea |
| Language | Korean |
It made its world premiere in the Venice Days sidebar of the 69th Venice International Film Festival,[1][2][3] where it won the 2012 Queer Lion, an award for the "best film with a homosexual and queer culture theme."[4] It is the first Korean film to have won the prize.[5][6] It also won a Special Award at the 2013 Fantasporto Orient Express Awards.[7] Jeon Kyu-hwan was awarded Best Director at the 16th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival,[8][9][10] and the Silver Peacock award for best director at the International Film Festival of India.[11] Cho Jae-hyun won Best Actor at the 2013 Fantasia Festival.[12][13][14]
Most of director Jeon Kyu-hwan's previous films, including Berlinale-featured Varanasi and Dance Town, have dealt with the underbelly of society. The Weight is his fifth feature-length film.[15]
Jung is the mortician at the morgue who has to heavily rely on medicine for his severe tuberculosis and arthritis. Despite his illness, cleansing and dressing the dead is a noble and even beautiful work to him. Jung is the last living person who silently takes care of the dead. So for him, his life at the morgue is both a reality and a fantasy while the corpses are his models and friends for his paintings, his sole living pleasure.
Born with a hunchback and left at an orphanage, Jung was adopted by a woman who hid him away in the attic only to use him as a child slave for her dress shop. The woman's own child Dong-bae is younger than Jung; she has always wanted to become a woman, loathing her own male body. While Jung feels affection and sympathy for his younger stepsister, he feels burdened by Dong-bae's struggles. Under the weight of life and death carried by the dead bodies that he faces each day coupled with his love-hate relationship with Dong-bae, Jung endures the pain and thirst that he feels like a camel crossing a desolate desert in silence. Then he quietly prepares his biggest, his last gift for his sister.
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