Silver Apricot screened at the London Korean Film Festival, 9th Nov, 2025. This is the text of my live introduction.
Silver Apricot is a drama about a 32-year-old woman’s attempts to navigate her complicated, dysfunctional family, and to come out the other side with some integrity. As a drama, it is not exactly a film where spoilers apply, but nonetheless, I am going to confine this introduction almost entirely to a discussion of its opening two minutes, and of the way that this prologue introduces themes and intertexts that will be played out in the rest of the film.
In fact Silver Apricot has two prologues, although one follows rapidly upon the other, and they are both closely interwoven. In the first, we see a woman in a black robe riding a bicycle through the streets of Seoul at night, and then stopping to bite the neck – and drain the blood – of a man standing on the walkway. There is then a cut to the second prologue, where the protagonist Kim Jung-seo sits alone late at night in an office using her work computer to illustrate pages for her vampire-themed webtoon – but then, when her boss comes in, Jung-seo pretends instead to be working late on the poster campaign that he has assigned to her.
The vampiress in the first prologue both is and is not Jung-seo. Both are played by the same actress, Na Ae-jin, who was justly awarded at the 2024 Jeonju International Film Festival for her performance in Silver Apricot. Indeed, as Jung-seo sits at the computer, she is eating a wrap which leaves a fleck of red sauce – like blood – on the side of her lips, further consolidating the association between these two characters. And both the vampiress and Jung-seo are moonlighting, and trying to fit in with their environment as they carry out their own hidden agenda. The vampiress is the main character of Jung-seo’s webtoon, but is also Jung-seo’s fantasy version of herself, and how she appears in her own subsequent dreams. For Jung-seo is also an unsmiling loner adrift in a world not her own, and driven by desires that set her apart. And the initial focus of Silver Apricot on both blood and predation befits a film not only about family, but about a family whose every interaction is transactional, appetitive and venal.
If you have seen Davy Chou’s 2022 adoption drama Return to Seoul, then you might recognise in this film’s black-clad vampiress something of Freddie (Park Ji-min), the heroine of Davy Chou’s film, seen in the middle of Return to Seoul similarly black-clad and on the prowl on the Seoul streets at night. Indeed Jung-seo herself is a lot like Freddie in other respects too: she is wilful, scowling, headstrong, quite a little bit rude, not suffering fools gladly nor taking any prisoners, but most importantly rootless and confused about her identity – who she is, and where she comes from. Indeed the double-life that we see Jung-seo leading in the film’s opening scenes, as she uses the computer from her day job to work on a private publication by night, shows a character at odds with herself. And that tension between working to live, and making art to live well, between doing the soulless corporate grind and maintaining a less lucrative lifestyle of creativity, is one that other characters in the film are also struggling to work out for themselves in their different ways. For Jung-seo’s rakish father Yeong-joo (the brilliant Ahn Suk-hwan), her stepsister Jeong-hae (Kim Jin-young) and her old boyfriend Kim Tae-jun (Jo Ha-sung) all have, or at least had, artistic leanings like Jung-seo, and have had to find their own ways to negotiate a work-life balance.
Caught in the same internal conflict, Jung-seo strives to be true to her wilder, punkier, more inventive self, even as she is placed under pressure to pursue a more conservative, economically viable life of marriage, property ownership and family. For his feature debut, writer/director Jang Man-min traces Jung-seo’s brief journey back to her childhood home in Mukho, a harbour in Donghae City on Korea’s north-eastern coast, where the contradictions in her life reach crisis point and come to a head – and it shows how sometimes, we have to keep a healthy distance from our family to maintain our integrity.
One last thing: ‘silver’ and ‘apricot’ are, respectively, the literal meanings of the two characters that make up the word ginko – both the plant and its supposedly curative pseudo-fruit. Make of that what you will.
I hope you enjoy the film.
My programme note: When she is not doing graphic design for her Seoul day job, 32-year-old Kim Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) writes a vampire-based webtoon – and blood is on her mind. For she is returning to her seaside hometown of Donghae City to secure money owed by her estranged father the caddish restaurateur Yeong-joo (Ahn Seok-hwan), so that she can place a downpayment on a new Seoul condo and start putting down roots of her own with fiancé Park Gyeong-hyun (Kang Bong-seong).
Sullen, ever dissatisfied Jung-seo bonds with her sunny half-sister Kim Jung-hae (Kim Jin-yeong), who harbours similar if younger dreams of being an artist. Jung-seo also both embraces and despairs of the transactional, indeed vampiric nature of all her relationships, recognising something of her father’s mischievous hedonism in herself.
Jang Man-min’s feature debut is a messy saga of blood, roots, family dysfunction and the transient nature of material things in our lives.
strap: Jang Man-min’s debut feature is a messy saga of blood, roots, family dysfunction, artistic aspirations and capitalistic concerns
© Anton Bitel
