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What happens when you’ve exhausted all options and cast your last line of hope into the sea of unfulfilled American Dreams? This is the question posed by writer-director Justin Kim WooSŏk in his Korean American short film Sarajin. Making its debut at the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival, the story follows an unobtrusive but diligent snow crab fisherman (Jongman Kim) struggling to make ends meet for his immigrant family. When the snow crab that he and the rest of the fishing village depend on suddenly disappear due to climate change, he and his family have to decide whether to stay or leave their new home behind.
Here, the filmmaker talks to Deadline about displacement, life out on the ocean and wanting to poke holes in the follies of the American Dream to show a nuanced breadth of the immigrant experience.
DEADLINE: How did you end up in filmmaking? Were your parents creatives? Where do you think you got your creative ambitions from?
JUSTIN KIM WOOSŎK: I’m the first artist in my family. But there was always a creative current through my family. For example, I know secretly that my dad took acting classes in college but didn’t tell my grandparents. He was not allowed. But, I mean, I think growing up in LA, even though my parents were not artists or cinephiles, I was lucky to be able to go to local cinema techs. Cinefamily was a big one for me growing up, and my parents would also take me to the corner video store back when there were video stores, and we would get all the Korean horror, thriller movies and Japanese horror movies.
So, I just grew up watching a lot of movies and then ended up going to a liberal arts school with a great film program and got a lot of support there and decided, later on in college, that I should actually try to make the things I spend so much time watching.
DEADLINE: Where did the idea for Sarajin come from? And why base it in Alaska?
WOOSŎK: Alaska has been a place of interest for me for a while. A lot of my friends and I, there’s a circuit of people going to Alaska for decades to make a quick buck, especially artists trying to make quick cash. [Some] worked the salmon season up in Bristol Bay over the summer. So, it’s always been a place of interest for me, even though I haven’t grown up there and don’t have family there. In 2022/2023, I heard from friends that these essential fisheries were shutting down. These are places where a lot of the snow crabs, king crabs, all those things are caught that feed the rest of the U.S. And also, it’s a huge part of the Alaskan economy.
When I heard these fisheries were shutting down and saw that there was hardly any news about it, I was like, “Well, I’m really interested in making a story there,” but through a lens that was familiar to me, which is the immigrant lens. And so, I went up there and spent some time with crab fishermen and people trawling for deep-water fish. I also met a lot of the fishermen who depended on these fisheries. So, I put all those experiences together into the script. Because it’s one of those things where you hear 10 billion snow crabs disappeared, and you’re like, “What does that mean? That’s crazy.”
DEADLINE: Right. Where did they go?
WOOSŎK: Exactly, where’d they go? So, I wanted to make a story about that, but in particular, through the lens of this immigrant family, a dynamic I’m very familiar with. There are also a lot of immigrants and indigenous folk in Alaska, and I wanted to show their perspective as people who depend on these fisheries. I was so lucky to get admitted to this program. The program director was very supportive of that vision, so I wrote a script and Rising Voices, Lena Waithe and Indeed ended up financing it. So, we went out to Alaska. I did some research because I also come from a documentary background and wanted to do [the topic] right. So, we ended up shooting in Alaska and San Pedro.
DEADLINE: I read you also traveled to South Korea in addition to Alaska to do some research for the film. Do you want to talk about what you learned in both locations?
WOOSŎK: When I was first writing the script, I was actually doing a Fulbright scholarship in South Korea about independent filmmaking. I just happened to be on the East Coast near Yangyang and Sokcho, these historical fishing ports, and I was spending time with fishermen and the snow crab fishermen in Korea and seeing how it was done there. I had actually initially wanted to shoot in Korea. While that was happening, I also heard about all the stuff in Alaska. I was like, “Well, I have to go see how it’s done in Alaska.” And the way fishing is done is very different. I think the dynamics of diaspora and the economic need of this fishery came together in a way that was more interesting to me in Alaska. So, that’s why I ended up shooting in Alaska.
DEADLINE: Can you talk to me about finding your leads, Jongman Kim and Taehee Kim? The way they played the married couple in the short was giving lived-in drama and high-quality acting enough for a feature-length film.
WOOSŎK: That’s impressive feedback, thank you. This is actually a fun story because, I think, for a lot of POC or immigrant filmmakers, sometimes it’s really difficult to find that perfect combination of someone who is of a certain age or generation that has a certain fluency in the native language and has acting experience. Often, if you’re an Asian actor or want to be an Asian actor, you’re of a certain generation where there were just not that many opportunities to hone your craft. Or if you had gotten those roles, maybe you’re better at English because you came here much younger, so your Korean fluency isn’t quite the same.
So, it was really tricky, and I think I wanted to find someone who really looked the part; they looked like they could handle being on a boat, that they’d gotten some sun and lived that kind of life I was going for in the film. I wasn’t going for a glossy K-Drama look or anything like that. So, I think Jongman was so special because he’s a good silent actor. He can do so much with so little. But finding him was a different story altogether because I had difficulty finding someone who checked all those hyper-specific boxes. It ended up being my makeup artist, Moung Hui Park, who found him at a party full of Korean creatives and artists, and she calls me because I had been complaining to her like, “I can’t find my actor. What am I going to do?” So, she called me and was like, “Justin, I think I know who you need.” She introduced me to Jongman, and I had him read. While I have him read, I’m still looking for the wife character, and I’m listening to the person reading with him, and I’m like, “She’s doing a really good job. I’m really curious about her. Can we turn the camera around and have her audition as well?” We had her audition, and I was like, “Oh, that’s perfect. These two are perfect.” We later find out that they’re married in real life.
DEADLINE: Hilarious. How easy was that?
WOOSŎK: They had just started to act together recently. So, I think I just got really lucky in finding them. We had a very truncated casting period and an amazing casting director, Matthew Glasner, but it just happened so organically. And the fact that they had already come married with all that entails was great because we didn’t have much time to do rehearsal either. I was really happy to have found them.
DEADLINE: And you don’t have to worry about building chemistry because a wife is definitely going to know how to be specifically upset in the way that she’s upset in the movie. Like, when she was kind of verbally sparring with him while doing the dishes and then just exited the room instead of blowing up on him, I felt that.
WOOSŎK: I was just like, “Channel what you already know.” [laughs]
DEADLINE: You’ve already touched upon the research portion of how you decided to lay out your film, but was there anything that surprised you in the process of filming?
WOOSŎK: We don’t get too much into this relationship in the film, but there’s something about the really complicated relationship between fisheries, which are managed by the government and regulated and set by Fish and Wildlife and government entities, and then the canneries, which are the ones that set the price for the fish and then the fisherman themselves. So, there’s a really complicated triangle of pricing, conservation and legality. That was surprising to me and definitely influenced the way I was thinking about the different characters.
The other thing that surprised me while I was there was just how, even though the work is very difficult, it was also very much like playing a sport. It was a high-wire act, so you just have this adrenaline pumping. I could see why, even though it’s such a difficult job, and it pays well, occasionally, people do kind of fall in love with that, and the experience also includes just being out in the water. I was out in the Gulf of Alaska for a week. We got stuck in an ice storm and had to anchor. But then you go out at night, and you’re kind of just out on the deck and you’re looking up and it’s like this incredible connection to the water and the sky, and it’s a small moment. Most of the time, you’re hauling that or cleaning this or cooking or whatever, and it doesn’t smell good. No one’s taking a shower. But you have those small moments, and I think that helped me better connect with the character and the connection with the water and the ocean, especially because the idea for DongSu, for Jongman’s character, was that it was a generational thing.
I also saw in Korea how proud people were of the work that they were doing, but also how concerned they were about the fact that things were shifting. In Alaska, the fisheries are shutting down because species are just disappearing. And in Korea, it’d be like, “This fish was never this far north.” I remember we fished it when we were all the way in Jeju, down in the south, but now it’s all the way close to the DMZ. It’s a really strange experience. So, yeah, I was just hearing all these different experiences, but those are the ones I think kind of stuck out to me.
DEADLINE: Why the title Sarajin? And I’m curious about a repeating line in the film: “The ocean will never fail us.” What is the significance of these words to you?
WOOSŎK: Sarajin is from the infinitive Sarajida, which is to disappear. And that’s because I feel like that word was hitting different levels of the story, both the snow crabs and also this dream for the dad and possibly this different life in Alaska versus somewhere else in the U.S., like in Atlanta. On top of that, on the next level, it’s also about the fishery. This way of life and economy is also disappearing. And I think the Korean word for disappearing itself is so beautiful and can refer to so many different things. I think it carried the weight of ideas that I was having and the things that were happening.
As far as the line, “The ocean will never fail us.” That was something I actually came up with with our actor, Jongman. So, he’ll get some credit, too [laughs]. But we were thinking about what could be some old-timey phrase that someone might’ve heard from their grandpa, who was a fisherman. Where is his blind faith coming from? Where is this sort of denial coming from? And I think it’s just a kind of phrase that captures the faith of the ocean that’s been passed down for generations.
DEADLINE: I can’t stop thinking about a couple of shots. The first one is when DongSu is contemplating sticking with the uncertain returns of being a fisherman vs. securing his family’s safety back in South Korea by moving back. He’s in the dark, the shadow is bathing him. He seems a little prideful but genuinely cares about his daughter and wife. All of this seems so fully fleshed out. What does a feature film look like for you to expand upon this character?
WOOSŎK: I love films about a moral choice and having characters boil things down to a moral choice. A lot of great Iranian films, like Asghar Farhadi films, but also American films like Michael Clayton, this sort of reluctant hero kind of protagonist in that sense, I think it’s so interesting, especially in the context of a realist drama. I think a feature version of this would probably show a bit more about fishing, why people do it, and town life in Alaska. And then part of this sort of thing that was interesting in dealing with this story was, I think we’ve seen immigrant narratives where you see point A to point B, and then it’s like, “Oh, and then life sprouts at point B.” For me personally, and I think for a lot of friends who’ve also moved around a bunch, it’s like, “No, immigration is a series of multiple stops.” And I was really interested in, “OK, well, what does it mean when you’re… Let’s put the camera in one of the places where it’s an in-between place, the place that you spent a year or two, maybe a couple of years while you’re still searching, or your parents are searching for this more permanent rest stop.” And I would probably show a little bit more of that journey.
As for the shot you’re talking about. The existence of that shot is partly because of practicality. We shot this film in two days, it was a very tight shooting schedule. So, we were shooting 20+ setups a day, which is much faster than usual for narrative. And we had to get rid of a lot of shots, and the DP, Rasa Partin, and the rest of the team and I were like, “OK, we don’t have any time for coverage, so how can we get all this happening in one frame?” So, for that shot in particular, we really thought a lot about how I love films where you have the same framings that you return to sequentially throughout the film, and it’s not like the place has shifted. It’s like your relationship to what’s happening on screen has. So, at that point [in the film], I think it was like, “OK, I think people will understand the stakes here and what it means for this dad to kind of finally come and face this decision that he has to make.” We really wanted to play with the darts, the sound and we wanted the marble and the daughter there without really showing it too much. And, of course, again, we’re so lucky to have Jongman. And so, it really just kind of came down to like, “OK, we have all these things we want to say. Let’s do it in this one tableau shot.”
DEADLINE: The other shot is at the end of the film, the family deciding to leave. You’ve got these shots of the apartment that feel haunted as they drift from the empty bedroom, the rusted sink, and the living room before settling on this beautiful but empty shot of the ocean. Why was this important to see?
WOOSŎK: It comes back down to the same technique of same, but different. We chose to repeat the same camera angles from the very beginning of the film when the family was there, and the apartment was very stuffed and full of different things. And we really just wanted to prompt the audience. We wanted to prompt people to think like, “Oh, well, do you feel this disappearance? How can we best make you feel this disappearance and what it means?” And I think that the apartment definitely looks a little haunted and a little sad. And there was something about ending the film on the image of this ocean, which is also featured in the dad’s POV when he was washing the deck of the boat.
But again, we just wanted to prompt the audience to think like, this is a real story, and what do we think? How does it make us feel that this is happening? And kind of sit with that a little bit, hopefully, if the film does have any staying power. So, that was sort of the thinking behind that, the end sequence.
DEADLINE: Something that you mentioned earlier about this film, it is interesting that, we do get a lot of films about the immigrant family coming here and then being gung-ho, about doing whatever it takes to complete the “American Dream,” or whatever that means to them. But in your film, it’s actually like, “No, we’re actually going back.” That’s not too often depicted. Is there something you wanted audiences to take away or emphasize by having this idealism flipped here in the short film?
WOOSŎK: Immigration is just really complicated. I was interested in showing these immigrants’ lives in a very remote part of America. I think people are not necessarily aware of the dynamics and the economies there and how the link between the disruption in climate leads to disruption in the economy and leads to all different kinds of displacement. And I wanted to show that it is not this aspirational vertical. It’s all these loops within loops and loops and asking what the decision is once you’re caught on the edge of the cliff of perhaps feeling like you’re going backward, and how does that feel for a parent who only wants to advance and help their kid advance?
I think we’re all kind of learning the different follies that are involved in this American Dream that’s been fed to our parents and certain parts of it that are fantasy, and I kind of want to just poke some holes in there and show a larger breadth of what that looks like. It’s also kind of similar to my experience. I moved around so much as a kid, so I wanted to honor that a little bit and think a little bit about what my parents felt when they decided to move somewhere where maybe that wasn’t their first choice.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you?
WOOSŎK: I’m working on my first feature screenplay. It’s called Dancing with Cranes. It’s not necessarily a straight adaptation of this short film, but it’s definitely inspired by what I’ve learned from making it. It follows a young journalist on assignment in Nebraska when she uncovers a dark crime while covering the Great Crane migration in the heartland of America.
And so, it’s very similarly influenced by themes of the relationship between family and humans and immigration, diaspora and nature. And so that’s kind of what I have next on my plate. It’s something I’ve been working on through the Sundance TAAF Fellowship and the CJ & TIFF Labs. So, I’m hoping to complete the script and start to show it around to people later this year.
DEADLINE: Are there any states that you’re going to work in that are more popular?
WOOSŎK: That’s a great question [laughs]. I would love to shoot a romance in New York City. That would be cool. I have a whole different idea for that. But it’s just one of those things where I definitely feel like, you just kind of go to where you feel the story is. And I think there are these amazing spectacles, some might say otherwise, but these incredible forces of nature that just sometimes happen to be in these really remote places.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
