I share my comments on “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” a futuristic, experimental, sci-fi, short film directed by Kim Ayoung, which is being screened at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (June 29 – July 9, 2023).

Ernest Mo is a young delivery rider that works for Delivery Dancer, a powerful courier company. She constantly carries goods through a labyrinthine, techno futurist Seoul. Thanks to a unique algorithm developed by the company and a technology that allows her to bend time and space, she manages to deliver her packages. But reality starts to crack when she runs into an alternative version of herself. Are different worlds clashing together? Or has her mind fractured?

“Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” is a social critique of how technology is making bodies invisible and the alienation that this produces. It is no surprise that in the film the top rank drivers are called “Ghost Dancers” due to their high efficiency and ability to become invisible to their clients. Our protagonist, Ernest Mo (anagram of Monster) is one of them. She cruises the city delivering endless stream of packages without interacting with another person. She also is invisible to her own company as her interactions are only via the phone application. The protagonist’s body is also invisible to the audience as she is always wearing her company’s clothes and we can only see her face from time to time.

The fact that different realities clash together can be thought as a result of the alienation of our protagonist. As in real life, delivery dancers have no control over their workload and are judged and ranked only on their delivery quota. To the company and her clients, she is only a blue dot on a GPS screen.

The film, which was conceived after the COVID-19 pandemic, uses different techniques such as live-action, 360 video, computer generated imagery (CGI), to create a very isolated and dystopic world. Although the story unfolds in a linear way at one point everything becomes redundant giving us that feeling of being in a narrative with no end.

Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is definitely a short film you shouldn’t miss at the BIFAN. I would like to thank the organizers of this festival as I was given a private screener to enjoy the film. – Sebastián Nadilo

You can watch this film on:
July 6, 2023 | Thursday | CGV Sopung 10 | 14:00 pm

Trailer:

About the director:
In her multifaceted practice, Ayoung Kim synthesizes the outcomes of far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border controls, the memories of stones and virtual memories, and ancestral origins and imminent futures. These narratives take the forms of video, moving image, virtual reality (VR), game simulation, sonic fiction, diagrams, and texts that the artist presents as exhibitions, screenings, performances, theatrical projects, and publications. Kim decisively integrates geopolitics, mythology, technology, and futuristic iconography in her work, and she retroactively seeks speculative time to infiltrate the present.

For more information about the BIFAN please visit: https://www.bifan.kr/eng/

For more information about the director and the film please visit: http://ayoungkim.com/wp/3col/delivery-dancers-sphere-2022?ckattempt=1