Yangnimdong Girl
Dir. 오재형 (Oh Jae-Hyung)
Featuring 임영희 (Im Young-Hee)
Podo Bookstore
Gwangju
May 22, 2026
(Jisu Sheen recently moved from New Haven to Gwangju, South Korea, where she’s covering local arts and culture for the New Haven Independent and Midbrow.)
How was it possible for God to create the universe in just six days?
This is just one of 임영희 (Im Young-Hee)’s many unanswered questions she has had over the course of her life. Often, these skepticisms have been met with anger. The God question was no different.
Im’s teacher, astonished she would doubt God’s power, punished her by beating her with a broom and making her carry a metal dustbin above her head.
“It wasn’t plastic like the ones now,” she says in the narration of a half-hour film about her life, 양림동 소녀 (Yangnimdong Girl), directed by her son 오재형 (Oh Jae-Hyung). I went to a screening of the film at Podo Bookstore in Gwangju’s Buk-gu district Friday night. Im, the real Yangnimdong girl (so-named for her childhood neighborhood in Gwangju), was in attendance. She gave a talk after about the movie and her illustrated book the film is based on.
After losing mobility on her right side following a stroke, Im started drawing with her left hand. These are the drawings at the heart of her book and film.
In the film’s voiceover narration, Im spoke in the same calm, matter-of-fact tone whether she was talking about childhood frustrations, adult medical emergencies, or the democratic uprising in Gwangju in 1980, when the Korean military killed its own citizens.
Im’s steady narration and clear-eyed drawings form a style allowing her to speak to all ages without sacrificing honesty. At the post-screening talk, Im seemed happiest to see a pair of young students. She paused what she was saying to chat with them, asking them where they went to school.
In the film and book, when words fall short, Im draws the feeling.
When she tells the story of being captured by authoritarian police and tortured for over 20 days, she draws herself with stars—her way of expressing the unbearable pain of the experience.
In the film, Im’s frankness isn’t just a way to recount tragedies. It also makes heartfelt stories more precious, and funny ones funnier. She talks about how nice it feels when her husband starts designing dresses for her and the benevolent forces that led them to first meet. Early in the film, she talks about becoming “cultured” after her dad buys her a dress. She suddenly has a taste for books, movies, and theater.
In one illustration, Im tells the story of winning a school literary contest. The stack of books in the drawing, she explains, bears the names of authors like Dostoevsky, Kim Dong-Ri, and Shakespeare—her favorite writers. And her name is on top, “because, to me, I am the best.” That’s just how she felt.
Through her illustrated stories, Im weaves a path through her first sparks of interest in writing, political activism, and the grim days in May 1980 when she was sure the sip of water she was drinking would be her last. She talks about what it was like to record 임을위한행진곡 (Marching for Our Beloved), in a secret room with the windows covered.
Im isn’t done making drawings. When I met her at the screening, she showed my friend and me an illustration she had made urging people to boycott Starbucks after their 5.18 “Tank Day” controversy.
“Yangnim-dong Girl” is one of those pieces of art I feel might change me forever. When I decided to move to Gwangju, it felt perhaps a bit simplistic to think I would magically absorb more of the legacy of activism I had so many questions about. But here I was, on the cozy fourth level of a community bookstore, getting a glimpse not just of Im’s story but the style in which she tells it.
