Director: Kwon Aram
Showing at the Queer East Film Festival 2023, Kwon Aram’s debut Home Ground is a celebration of a bar in Seoul called LesVos, a safe haven for lesbian and trans teenagers and young people in the 1990s, and now a far tamer but still important community bar and restaurant. With Myong-woo at the helm, Aram’s documentary explores the impact of the space for the people who it protected, interviewing several of the patrons and personal friends of the owner, many of whom are now in the 60s and reflecting on a life that they have spent together.
Built around the impressive personality of Myong-woo, this is a fairly conventional film that balances fly-on-the-wall footage with talking heads interviews to create a sense of the impact of the bar and its importance. Several speakers reflect on the expectations placed on young women and the conventions they were expected to uphold – much like our own – to marry men and have children, the possibility of being anything else was inconceivable and Aram makes that point clearly.
The importance of LesVos is therefore vital to this story, and Aram shows the important unconventional role it played, refusing to let in any women with conventional long hair and providing a venue where individuals could dress in gender non-conforming ways and mix with others like them – one of the most important points made in Home Ground is just how many of the interviewees grew up thinking that they were alone but found a connection and a lifetime of friendship at LesVos, and the district of Seoul they discovered as a result.
But Aram gets lost with too many points of view, following different characters with too little introduction to who they are and the relationship they have both to the bar and its owner including a dance studio. Beyond the straightforward emphasis on the importance of this place, it isn’t clear what Aram wants to say and the second half of the film is therefore less focused, not helped by the jerky cuts in talking head interviews that look messier and more obvious than they should.
Marking the final day of the Queer East Film Festival, Home Ground talks a great deal about what this place means to the individual but less about the role of bars like this and inclusive pioneers like Myong-woo in the country as a whole. How has South Korea changed in this time and as the people on the frontline of this change grew up, is there only this melancholy sense of loneliness and loss left behind? Age and Covid may be the focus in the final 30-minutes but is the battle for acceptance really won and what does that mean for the future of the community in Seoul?
Queer East Festival 2023 takes place 18 – 30 April across venues in London. For further information: https://
