The South By Southwest Festival is massive and complex and messy, but somewhere deep down in its core, beyond corporate sponsorships and red carpets, it’s still about making connections. A massive swath of humanity descends upon Austin, TX to learn, to share, and to press on. In classic SXSW fashion, my wife’s coworker mentioned that a friend of his had shot a short doc and was looking for lodging during the festival, and that is how director/cinematographer Benjamin Kodboel ended up crashing in our house for SXSW. I didn’t catch the shorts block containing the film he lensed, Welcome Home Freckles, but was stoked for he and his team when they ended up taking the special jury award for documentary shorts, and decided to check the film out on the SXSW screener library. I think it’s worth giving all this background for a couple of reasons, one being that there’s still a ton of humanity, relevance, and connection made possible by the massive entity that is SXSW. Another is that in all honesty, I personally don’t often give short films a fair shake. Life is busy, the market is crowded, and there’s never enough time to see all the movies I deeply want to see. So it’s easy enough to skip short films altogether. But there’s much value in shorts and I’m pleased I took the time to check out Welcome Home Freckles, even if it took the cinematographer literally staying in my house and the film winning jury recognition to convince me that hey, maybe I should press play on this thing.
Director and subject Huiju Park tells some of her own story here, returning home to South Korea after much time away in order to unpack some of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, and some of the enablement that her mother offered to her father. In a mere 25 minutes we’re introduced to Park as she has a series of extremely vulnerable and challenging conversations with her mother, her grandmother, her father, and even reflects at the gravestone of his father. Park proves a brave soul indeed, probing and questioning and sticking up for herself as family attempt to downplay the abuse that she suffered thanks to drunken rage in the household.
How we’re introduced to Park is part of the brilliance of the short. There are no talking head set ups here. There’s not much in the way of on screen text to ease us into this powerful moment. In fact, it seems Park (and Kodboel) almost set out to create a documentary that feels like a narrative. I legitimately questioned for a moment if I was watching the right short because it felt so… non-documentary in its style. This creates something powerful, though. And you quickly realize that with a documentary this intimate and personal, you’re not going to get multiple takes and professional lighting and sound set ups in order to have profoundly personal conversations. You’re likely only sitting down to ask your abusive father about his memories of when he began hitting you once. You can’t exactly shout “cut” and reset to get a better angle of your dad’s face as he struggles to remember how he hurt you. So the short almost has to feel like a narrative in a way that many docs do not.
There’s a core bravery to what Park is setting out to do here. She’s putting her own trauma and the generational struggles of her own family out into the world for audiences to see. And while most families wouldn’t allow their skeletons to come this far out of the closet, it’s clear that Park is drawing a line in the sand that the abuse will stop with her and that this film represents part of her effort to break the cycle of generational abuse that her own grandfather set into motion with the drunken abuse of her father, which passed along to her.
A repeated theme throughout is that the abuser often forgets, but the abused remember everything. This becomes clear in her vulnerable conversations with her grandmother, who was abused by her grandfather, and her father, who was abused by his father. Park’s dad remembers well the fear and confusion that his father inflicted upon him, but gets hazy in the details of how he himself hurt her.
Beautifully shot and constructed, filled to the brim with aching vulnerability and a desire to break the cycle, Welcome Home Freckles is a brave work not simply offering a therapeutic exercise for its subject and director. Rather, the short exposes for its audience the hard work that can be involved in honestly confronting traumatic abuse and the lengths one must often go to in order to end intergenerational violence.
And I’m Out.
