Old Partner is a beautiful movie about a 79 year old man named Choi and his 40 year old ox. As the movie begins we discover that the ox, already well into the twilight of his life, has only about a year to live. What follows is the gentle, slow tale of a life long friendship and loyalty.
Old Partner is a very difficult movie to describe. Watching it is almost like watching a poem and it really needs to simply be experienced. The film is a meditation on a wide range of things – relationships, love, work, the meaning ascribed to one’s life, your worth to your community – and it mixes them together perfectly, by simply showing us real life. Set in a rural part of South Korea, we watch as the whole story of the Choi and the ox unfolds. They have been together for 40 years and every day they go up to the fields to do some kind of work. During the day Choi slaves over his fields, with a permanent leg injury stemming from bad acupuncture in his youth and this ox is the only reason he has been able to perform such great amounts of work over the years. This is why he also slaves over ensuring that the ox is incredibly well fed with the best grains, weeds and fodder he can find. Choi speaks often of the ox saying that it is his karma and that when the ox dies he will give it a proper burial, something unheard of for a work animal. “Beast of burden” is a term that can be ascribed to both Choi and the ox, as Choi has taken on his share of burden throughout his lifetime raising and feeding nine children to adulthood, he directly attributes the money they earned to put their children through school to the ox.
The ox itself has little personality, at lease little that it shown on camera. He walks slowly,and what looks like painfully, back and forth to the fields with his load. He and Choi are perfect foils for one another, perfect partners.
Unfortunately the director Chung-ryoul Lee was not able to be there for the Q&A afterward as his plane was landing just as the film began. I would have very much like to hear about this process during this film and, most importantly, how did this particular subject present itself for creating this film. Alas, I will have to wait for another opportunity to see the movie with a Q&A, but these are questions I’m very interested in hearing responses to, as I know many others are
Old Partner is a beautiful movie which I imagine has a very personal effect on the viewer depending on the place they’re at in life, their self-awareness with their own mortality and their understanding of their place in the world. It is an excellent movie that deserves to be seen. I strongly recommend it.
Old Partner is the recipient of the HBO Documentary Films Emerging Artist Award at Hot Docs this year.
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