Writer and Director: Divine Sung
Receiving its World Premiere at this year’s BFI Flare Festival is Divine Sung’s Summer Camera, a story of first love in modern-day South Korea. For most of its running time, the film is sweet and undemanding, but the last 15 minutes, as hearts are broken and secrets revealed, demonstrate that Sung is a director with a great future ahead of her.
Teenage Summer hasn’t taken any photographs since her father died. She still carries his old Nikon with her to school, along with a backpack stuffed with other mementoes to remind her of her father. The Nikon contains undeveloped film that he was using before his death. But there are still four photos left to take.
When she meets Yeonwoo, Summer can’t resist snapping her school’s star football player. When Yeonwoo grins broadly like a film legend and shines like an icon, Summer “hears the shutter click” and she begins taking pictures of the girl who already has adoring fans. Three photos capture Yeonwoo as she walks back to the pitch. But she turns round for the last shot with a smile as wide and white as two goalposts. Summer is smitten.
The film adds an edge of mystery when she goes to collect the prints from this reel of film. She’s pleased with her shots of Yeonwoo, but her father’s pictures show discreet images of a man in the woods. It doesn’t take her long to track him down. Could it be that her father was having an affair with another man?
However, Sung refuses to give the viewer a detective story. This is not the film she wants to tell, but the conversations between Summer and this man come across as stilted, unlikely and underdeveloped. At the same time, her own relationship with Yeonwoo is too saccharine and for, a while, nothing much happens, leading to the film wilting in the middle.
But when Summer begins to question how her father died, Summer’s Camera quickly clicks back to life and the end is gripping as it explores grief and healing. Sung’s own camera is careful not to give too much away.
While same-sex relationships are becoming more accepted in South Korea, Sung admits that her film is partly fantasy, presenting a society how she wants it to look rather than reflecting a society that already exists. This imagined culture of acceptance is best portrayed in the way Summer walks down empty streets, often the only figure in sight. When she talks to the mysterious man in his barber shop, no one ever walks past the window. These unpeopled scenes add a dreamlike quality to Sung’s debut feature.
As Summer, Kim Sia is impressive; guarded, yet hopeful, capturing how childhood is made up of auspicious moments that will change one’s life forever.
Summer’s Camera is screening at BFI Flare 2025 from 19-30 March.
