Synopsis
The film’s perspective gradually shifts from that of an outsider observing the struggle in Milyang to what the local residents witness as they face the life problem regarding the construction of high-voltage transmission cable towers. In the process, we are led to re-examine the meaning of Milyang’s struggle, tainted with prejudice and misunderstandings. In Gol-an Village, transmission towers are nearly finished, and in Yong-hoe Village the construction has just begun while in Yong-hoe Village it is just about to start. The stories about these three villages are connected by images of the village entrance through to the mountain top. This way, the film depicts the resentment and pain of the elderly women in the villages before and after the construction, as well as systematically revealing numerous issues surrounding the high-voltage transmission cable towers.

Program Note
Milyang is a familiar name of a place but the place is barely visited by people in reality. To them, Milyang may be a landscape seen through the window from a train in the Gyeongbu line, a background in which a disturbing incident was taken place, a title of a film that gave the best leading actress award to a Korean actress at the Cannes Film Festival; therefore, it is a region recalled by some images from time to time rather than one’s own actual experience. Since Milyang’s residents began fighting against the government and the Korea Electric Power Corporation to stop the construction of transmission towers, Milyang became an actual place where our neighbors live, laugh and cry. Five young documentary directors question, see, film and deliver Milyang from their own perspectives in Milyang, a Welcome Guest . This is a cinematic practice of Milyang residents’ opposition, symbolized as ‘grandmas’, to the transmission tower construction. Strangers’ prejudice and misunderstanding, inhabitants’ depression and belief, survival and the memories that needed to be protected from governmental authority as well as capital, sky, land, and water that can’t be left alone to be ruined by politics and economy, and people living there. Just like grandmas of Milyang fighting for their own lives, directors fight by making films. The audience can also contribute by watching the film and sympathizing with the grandmas. [LEE Angela]