2014 Films: Oh! My Princess

Oh! My Princess by Heewook SA
South Korea (World Premiere)
Running Time: 16 Minutes
Screening Time: Saturday Sept 6th 12:45pm

He (Main Character) is a Taxi driver and single father, raising his high school student daughter since his divorce. One night, a student passenger takes his taxi. On the way to her destination, He looks embarrassed by the student's violent verbal abuse. After a while, he realizes that the destination of the student is his own apartment.

Director Statement 
The intention of directing
- I wanted to express blind love and obsession of parents for the children.

Production Notes 
It took about 7 months to prepare for scenario and pre-production phase. The film was shot for 4 weeks and done 5 times in split during the process. Post-production lasted for 4 months. The total budget of film production stood at KRW 13 million (approx. USD 12,740). 

As the movie is devoted to telling the story from perspective of a cab driver, I had to do most of the shooting on the move in a taxi. Moreover, a major challenge was location for the filmmaking in which more than 80% of the work comprised night time outdoors scenes. It leaves much to be desired when it comes to a smooth, unrestricted filming locations because of a limitation in closing street for movie shoot in a scene where the taxi, being towed by a towing vehicle, needs to travel through many different places in downtown Seoul. 

Besides, the production team on location was deeply worried about installing lights in such filming situations as shooting and continuous movement to the next site which was not an easy thing to do. However, our film crew paid lots of attention before shooting a scene in a moving car, which might become too simple and boring, and thus we put our ideas together having discussions on how to avoid the monotony of these scenes, and used special equipment in an effort to prevent any scene that seems to move along in a dull fashion. 

Due to the apparent limits of space and time, I assume that actors play a very important role in this work in terms of an overall lead and progress of the movie. That explains why I put much more emphasis on casting than ever. Fortunately, I was able to cast a veteran character actor as the male lead as well as two actresses who correspond to the respective images. In fact, there was a big question of whether performance ensemble between a veteran actor and two beginner actresses (female students) was possible, but on the contrary a positive attitude shown by the two schoolgirls was well balanced with the veteran, leading character's center-of-gravity, which allowed me to work with them to craft a performance according to specific circumstances.

What I want to say in this movie is parents’ blind love for and obsession with their kid. Almost all parents in this world believe that their child is a victim at any rate, even when their son or daughter is one of the attackers. Recent issues of school violence cases seem like there are no assailant but all victims. Why is it that every one of these parents never thinks of their kid potentially being one of the assailants? Is their kid always supposed to be a good person by any means? To what extent could the parents’ blind trust on their kid be wrong and lead to mistaken results? I wanted to raise a question, to the best of my ability, about this kind of way society behaves today. My intention was to show that parents’ blind love and attachment to their kid are by no means good for their sons or daughters. In other others, I wanted to let people understand such blind trust could end up becoming a catastrophe in the long run.