In Memoriam: Hur Bum-wook

Animator and director Hur Bum-wook, who sadly passed away on July 28, had shown a deep and attentive interest in nonhuman beings, as well as those who are not fully accepted as members of human society, from his 2009 debut film, *Ordinary Meals*, onward. This special memorial screening brings together *Ordinary Meals* (2009), the work that marked the beginning of Hur’s artistic journey, and his final film, *Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease* (2024), to reflect on the meanings of the human and the nonhuman that he explored throughout his career. In his films, nonhuman beings do not remain possessions of humans but emerge as subjects with desires and lives of their own, prompting us to look anew at relationships we have long taken for granted. Hur Bum-wook paid close attention to beings enduring their most difficult moments in places beyond the reach of light. The worlds he created will outlast the time allotted to our own lives, continuing to cast their light on places that remain unseen.

[Film Introductions]

Ordinary Meals

Hur Bum-wook | 2009 | 7 min 6 sec | Color/B&W

A man finally acquires the “pet” he has always dreamed of. Yet no matter how much it eats, the creature can never satisfy its hunger. It devours everything in its owner’s home, growing larger and larger, until it eventually begins to swallow the entire city.

*Ordinary Meals* was Hur Bum-wook’s first animated film, made while attending a workshop at the Hankyoreh Culture Center. Through the endlessly voracious “pet,” whose body swells with each new act of consumption, Hur renders in striking and original images the paradox of an insatiable desire that ultimately destroys even the one who possesses it. The uncanny reversal in which something believed to be owned and controlled instead consumes human life itself anticipates the questions about relations between humans and nonhumans that would continue throughout his later work.

 Pig That Survived Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Hur Bum-wook | 2024 | 1 hr 45 min | Color

As the number of pigs slaughtered in response to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease surpasses one million, “Pig H” narrowly survives the hellish mass culling. To ensure that he will never be killed again, he chooses to become human. Meanwhile, Jeong-seok, who has endured bullying and exclusion throughout his life, dreams instead of living as a beast rather than a human. After killing a senior soldier who had tormented him during his military service, Jeong-seok flees into the forest to escape other people. There, the lives of Pig H, who longs to become human, and Jeong-seok, who wishes to relinquish his humanity, begin to intersect in strange ways.

A pig in a human body and a human in the body of a beast: by unsettling the positions of these two beings, the film relentlessly asks what it is that makes a human human. For the animals in the film, humans are at once the perpetrators who drive them toward death and the beings they must resemble in order to survive. For Jeong-seok, by contrast, human life is a fetter from which he desperately wants to escape, yet also a condition he can never fully abandon. As these opposing desires cross paths, the film expands its inquiry beyond the criteria of humanness to ask how we might treat, and live alongside, beings different from ourselves.