point of contact

DOSSIER 2006
The official online publication of the
Syracuse International Film Festival, Vol.3
A Point of Contact Production

A Red Recipe to Cook Crustaceans, Korea/Mexico
Eun-hee Ihm, Director
10 minutes, fiction

A cruel father is reincarnated as a crab, and is punished by his family. It explores the dark and violent side of life in a universe where all living things are related.

An abusive husband and father chokes to death while eating; later, his wife and son discover that he has been reincarnated as a crab and they cook and eat him/it. In a parallel story, a young man delivers some crabs to an older woman who pays him to have sex with her while she cooks the crabs.

Based on the teachings of Buddhism, the film explores the relations of all living beings in the seemingly inescapable fate of a culture based on violence. The future life of the little boy, made particularly eerie by the casting of a male actor as the lecherous woman, suggests that his happiness as he dines with his mother will be only temporary, while the depiction of the father in a police uniform suggests the official institutionalization of domestic violence. The camera angles and lightning reinforce the impression of a permanent state of fear, and the presence of evil, and the pervasiveness of the color red the mood. The composition of the family photo on the wall is reminiscent of the representation of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.