Land of Scarecrows

Some landscapes have been abused to such a degree that they make their inhabitants strange and lonely. Honghae in rural South Korea has this effect on Ji-Young, a female installation artist who feels like and wants to be a man. She, at any rate, blames her secret transgender existence on the wasteland where she grew up when she returns there from the Philippines with the shy young Rain. The two met each other at an agency specialized in procuring South Asian mail-order brides for Korean men. Searching for his foster father, Loi Tan, who has just been sacked from his job as a dishwasher, meets Rain, the newly wed bride without a bridegroom. The film portrays life in a utopian age which dawned long ago. Nowadays, neither animals nor plants are the way “nature” created them, and humans too have adopted similarly ambiguous lifestyles. Land of Scarecrows is a science fiction film about human emotions that take on surreal dimensions in dilapidated interior spaces and spread out into areas that are neither urban nor rural. —Berlinale