A team of Hallym University Media School Students majoring in Digital Media Content (Hoyoung Lee, Minwoo Kim, Joonchul Lee and Minyoung Jung) won the Excellence Award at the GIFF Student Short Film Festival with their movie <Sensor>. 

The students  joined Professor Hwanseok Lee ‘Digital Short Film Directing’ Class, where they developed their ideas for the project.  

Sensor shows a candid view of the life of an elderly person living alone during COVID whose daily routines have been altered as a result of the pandemic. 

His boring daily routine and monotonous living have become a virtue due concerns about COVID. The short 12-minute film gives pause for thought about the plight of the elderly during COVID.  

The main character is a grandfather who lives alone. On a hot summers day, he is lying on a bed in an old and shabby room where the only sound comes from a ticking clock. 

The social worker’s physical visits, one of the grandfathers only daily pleasures have stopped due to the pandemic and have been replaced with phone calls and a sensor which blinks from the ceiling to monitor his movement. 

The routine is the same every day, which is boring and isolating for the grandfather. 

In frustration, the grandfather turns off the sensor which results in his family rushing round to check on his well-being. Upon their arrival they find him coming out of the bathroom unharmed. After their initial relief they become angry that he had turned off the sensor.

They return to their busy family lives leaving behind the grandfather, alone on his bed with a dry expression on his face.

The GIFF Student Short Festival is a film festival hosted by Catholic Kwandong University, designed to support university students around the world who dream of becoming filmmakers and to develop the film industry as an event linked to the Gangneung International Film Festival (GIFF). 

A total of 120 entries participated in this year’s festival, and after going through three preliminary screenings and finals, the final 10 films were selected, with the winning films being aired on G1 Gangwon Broadcasting TV Station.

Director Joonchul Lee (Hallym Third Year Media School Student) said, ‘I did not expect to compete with the other excellent works, but I am very happy to receive the award. I share this honor with my team members who thought and worked hard together as a team.’

You can see the whole movie here on You Tube (in Korean).  

You can also see the full original article written by Adrian Kim & Chaewon Kim here (in Korean).