캡셥 주세요, or Captions Please, is a short documentary that examines something so normalized it rarely gets questioned, which is the way English functions as the assumed default in global media and how the rest of the world quietly adjusts to meet it. Co-directed with a close friend, the film was built around a dynamic that was just as layered behind the camera as it was in front of it. As an East Asian woman working alongside a Caucasian male co-director, the two of us brought genuinely different relationships to the film's central question about language, access, and whose comfort gets centered in storytelling.

The production barrier was one that ended up becoming the film's most profound undercurrent. Because the interview process was conducted entirely in Korean, I found myself in the constant position of translating every exchange for my co-director in real time, sentence by sentence, so that he could stay present in the creative process. It was painstaking and at times disorienting, but we pushed through it by trusting each other and trusting the work. What I did not anticipate was the weight of that experience catching up to me mid-production, the quiet but striking realization that I had become a living example of my own film's argument. I was doing exactly what the documentary was critiquing, bridging a language gap so that an English speaker could follow along. It was the kind of moment that does not just inform a film but becomes part of its soul, and it made Captions Please one of the most intellectually challenging projects I have made.

Roles: Co-Director, Editor, Producer, Cinematographer

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