A mild-mannered father who has always kept the peace takes on the system after his young daughter is bullied at school in “The Family Table,” a Korean drama from director Lee Hanju. The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM). Gyu-seong, 42, and Seon-gyeong, his 43-year-old wife, are building an unremarkable life with their two kids when they learn that their 12-year-old daughter Ji-woo has been the target of sexually inappropriate comments at school.
The school falls back on procedure to keep a lid on things, and a school violence review committee wraps up without a firm finding. Gyu-seong takes legal action. As the fight wears on, money worries and the scrutiny of people around them chip away at the family’s income and its bonds.
Then secrets emerge about Chan-yeong, a 12-year-old boy the family has only ever seen as the culprit, and the case swerves. Gyu-seong starts to wonder whether he is really fighting for his daughter or settling scores from a life of swallowed resentment. Lee says the film grew out of the small and large injustices people tolerate every day to avoid a fight.
It started with two questions. And what happens when someone who has always yielded to others and avoided confrontation finally speaks up for something they cannot afford to lose?” Lee says. Lee wants viewers to keep asking themselves what they would have done, rather than walk away with one answer.
An action taken in the name of justice can, at some point, inflict another wound on someone we love,” Lee says. The aim was to avoid sorting the characters into heroes and villains and to spend enough time with them to grasp why they chose as they did. A first draft is complete and the screenplay is being developed further.
Though the story comes from Korean society, Lee believes a family’s isolation under institutional pressure and public scrutiny could strike a chord elsewhere, and the team is open to international co-production and even to relocating the story outside Korea. Producer Kang Jeongwon was struck by the film’s central contradiction, that a fight to protect a family can upend its daily life. Kang also points to the pairing of family drama with a mystery that keeps forcing audiences to rethink both the characters and their own verdicts.
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