I was sharing another of my favorite Korean movies with Andrew, earlier today, so we watched 빈집 (“empty houses”). I really like this movie, but this time around, I was struck by how much of the movie was obviously filmed in Ilsan – I would guess about 50% of the outdoor shots were in neighborhoods and locations within walking distance of my apartment. That adds some interest to the movie, I guess. If you watch it, basically any scene in a flat neighborhood (i.e. no hills) would be Ilsan.
The movie concludes with an epigraph that goes:
우리가 살고 있는 세상이
we-SUBJ live-PROG-PRESPART life-SUBJ
꿈인지 현인지 알 수가 없다..
dream-be-IF presentmoment-be-IF know-FUTPART possibility-SUBJ thereisnot
We cannot know whether the life we live is a dream or incumbent [“real”].
This was kind of hard to translate – because I didn’t let myself go back and look at the translation given in the subtitles in the movie. But I think I got it right – the key is a grammar point on page 55 in my “grammar bible” (Korean Grammar for International Learners) about using two parallel clauses ending in -ㄴ지 with the verb 알다 to indicate “a choice between two uncertain or unknown possibilities.”
