Recovery

Strong women. Women who fight back. Women who keep running. Filmmaker Yeonjeong has always brought such women to the screen, and has long dreamed of directing a female-led action film. Yet she herself has never truly confronted her own body. One day, as her screenplay hits a creative wall, Yeonjeong finds herself inexplicably drawn to a jiu-jitsu academy. Despite her ambition to make a film that “breaks through with the whole body,” she finds her own body freezing at another person’s touch, as control repeatedly slips away from her.

Pinned down and defeated repeatedly on the mat, Yeonjeong finally faces the truth she has long hidden: the image of the strong woman she had been so fixated on was, in fact, born from her desire to escape the memory of assault and from the guilt she carried over the feeling that she had not been able to protect herself.

<Recovery> is more than a documentary about learning jiu-jitsu. It is a chronicle of learning how not to tap out against the overwhelming opponent called trauma, and a struggle to reclaim the body she had left in the hands of others. The film reveals that the “action” Yeonjeong longed to create lies not in dazzling camerawork, but in the very moment she lifts up the body that was once paralyzed by fear.