The Weight

Directed by Jeon Kyu-hwan (전규환)

Written by Jeon Kyu-hwan (전규환)

107min | Release date in South Korea: 2013/11/07

Synopsis
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 gets adopted by a woman when he was a child, who hides him away in the attic only to use him as a child slave for her dress shop. The woman has her own son who is younger than Jung; who has always wanted to become a woman, loathing his own male body. While Jung feels affection and sympathy for his younger stepbrother, he feels burdened by the weight of life that gets heavier by his sibling. Under the love hate relationship with his sibling and under the weight of life and death carried by the dead bodies that he faces each day, Jung endures the pain and thirst that he feels like a camel crossing a desolate desert in silence. And he quietly prepares his biggest, his last gift for his sibling.

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