Jueyon Yang’s moving, personal, and introspective documentary My Missing Aunt starts off by looking at familial secrets within her own family, but blossoms into a more sorrowful and sensitive examination of how women were, and in many ways still are, perceived in Korean society.
It all starts with a drunken phone call from Jueyon’s father. A high school literature teacher, her dad let slip one night that he didn’t want Jueyon to turn out like her aunt, who committed suicide. This was the first Jueyon had ever heard of this aunt on dad’s side of the family, let alone that she met such a sad and tragic end. When pressed, dad gives contradictory answers and half-truths, while her mom only knows what she has been told by her husband. Even when Jueyon starts piecing together her aunt’s life, she finds that the family has done everything possible to scrub her from their records, with the period from her early twenties until the time of her death almost completely gone.
Yang pursues her investigation doggedly, making a loving tribute to a woman she never got to know and someone who shouldn’t have been forgotten or ostracized in death. My Missing Aunt also follows the filmmaker’s own awakening to the roles women are often tasked with pursuing in Korean culture, where they are expected to be good daughters/sisters/mothers/wives instead of independent thinkers with dreams, goals, and desires of their own. My Missing Aunt builds to a moment that rocks Yang to her core and forces her stoic dad to come to terms with repressed feelings of grief, but the film is never salacious or sensational like a true crime documentary. It’s a caring and honest look at why people should always hold their loved ones close and never forget their contributions.
