'Life Unrehearsed' finds poetry in the everyday

Korea Herald

11-02-2025

In Banpark Ji-eun's intimate documentary, an elderly Korean lesbian couple in Berlin illuminate the universal through the particular
The beginning of Banpark Jieun's "Life Unrehearsed" carries the same unplanned intimacy that defines its cinematic approach. A chance encounter with a photograph — two elderly Korean women standing before Berlin's Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism — led the director on a yearlong quest to chronicle its subjects.
The result is a meditation on love that proves more profound than it initially seems. The documentary follows Soo-hyun and In-sun, former nurses now in their seventies, who've lived three decades together in Germany. Their story began at a Korean Christian Women's Association retreat in 1986, where Soo-hyun offered In-sun flowers. The gesture would lead In-sun to leave her husband and forge a new path in defiance of societal pressures.
The camera maintains a studied distance, transforming everyday routine into revelation: the couple improvising karaoke in their modest Berlin flat, lounging on beach sand, sharing ice cream and giving haircuts. These moments unfold with the organic quality of life itself— unscripted, unadorned, and powerfully ordinary.
Hate is a presence that surrounds their lives, but the film sidesteps the expected politicized discourse around sexuality and identity. When anti-gay protesters appear alongside Seoul's Pride parade, In-sun simply walks past. As the film touches on In-sun's departure from her husband, traces of scars and self-doubt are merely alluded to rather than dramatized. Likewise, Soo-hyun's family's disapproval of In-sun's public activism surfaces only in passing conversations as distant echoes of unresolved tensions.
Instead, we witness identities unfold through layers of intimacy: more than a lesbian couple, they are women, immigrants, aging pensioners, and above all, human beings — a prismatic existence the film drives home through its patient accumulation of detail.
In-sun, a charismatic and well-studied community leader who teaches fellow migrants about multicultural hospice care, travels to Seoul for Pride marches but curiously shows less enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ events in Germany. Soo-hyun, more reserved in public spaces, finds liberation in the Berlin Pride celebrations she regularly attends. They never hold hands in public, not out of shame but, in their words, because they "don't want to stand out." The camera's steady attention to such private moments speaks more about the human experience — how it resists reduction to fixed categories — than any theoretical framework could express.
The film's central conflicts emerge through challenges familiar to any aging couple: facing illness, giving and receiving care and confronting the possibility of death. When In-sun receives a cancer diagnosis, what drives the narrative forward is not the particularity of the LGBTQ+ experience but the universal language of care and commitment. ("Applying ointment on each other's back — that's sex," Soo-hyun jokes with characteristic warmth during hospital care.) This insistence on their fundamental humanity especially strikes a chord in the Korean context, where queer existence remains not merely invisible but actively denied and rendered abstract, alien or other.
Towards the film's end, the static camera captures the couple dancing on New Year's Day, awkward but defiant in its authenticity. "You only live once," Soo-hyun muses. "So what else is more important than living with someone you truly love?"
The film's power lies in letting such moments speak for themselves, without commentary or adornment. In doing so, it achieves what street protests and slogans rarely do: It makes the invisible not just visible, but vividly, unmistakably human.
"Life Unrehearsed" opens in theaters Feb. 12.