Little Forest Korean Movie Review

Movie : Little Forest (리틀포레스트)

Director: Im Soon-rye

Writer: Hwang Sung-goo

Cast:- Kim Tae-ri, Ryu Jun-yeol, Jin Ki-joo, Jung Joon-won, Moon So-ri, Jeon Guk-yang, Jang Jae-hee, Cha Soo-jin and others.

Adapted from the manga series “Little Forest” by Igarashi Daisuke.

About the show:-

The movie is about a young woman named Hye-won who decides to leave her difficult life in the city to move to the countryside, her hometown. 

The move allows her to acknowledge her traumas, her wounds and her scars. She works on healing herself by surrounding herself with food, nature and her childhood friends. 

(*This review may contain spoilers. If you have already watched the movie, please continue reading. If you haven’t watched the movie yet, you can still continue reading or you can come back to the review later.)

What the movie talks about:-

1) Sometimes healing happens in places of familiarity, it happens at the exact place where you were hurt and alongside the same people who hurt you.

Sometimes, for some people, when they are lost, they need to find/gain a sense of familiarity to get back their momentum and find their path. Familiar paths, familiar friends and familiar ambience helps them find solace. What I loved about the movie is how the director showed the process of healing. Healing can be both, a soothing process and a difficult process. You learn to let go, forgive, move on from hurt and pain but you also have to recollect and relive all the trauma. The movie shows how Hye-won chooses to come back home to her roots, focusing on rejuvenating, recuperating, finding the wind beneath her wings and getting back on her feet. Then she learns to get back to the real world and fight back with greater strength and power and conquer her dreams and let go of her fears. All this while she tries to push away from dealing with her pain from the past. But she cannot delay it for too long. She needs to acknowledge, accept and forgive and then let go of her pain and her past in order to move ahead in life.

2) All of us have to work on healing our traumas, the wounds and the unhealed scars so that we don’t bleed on the people who didn’t hurt us and blame them for the pain they haven’t caused us. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Healing takes time, effort, determination and discipline. Healing is as painful as it is relieving. The journey of healing is a series of ups and downs, the downs sometimes being too gut-wrenching. But the other side of the tunnel is bright, hopeful and full of promises and fulfillments. Life will still try to knock you down but after the healing journey, you are stronger to deal with every aspect of life and emerge victorious. 

If you do not heal what hurt you, you will forever have to deal with the pain it gave you. 

People are anxious about solutions to problems because they are too afraid to move on from the past, the pain and the problem. They think they’ll be lost once they move on.
We need to look for healing, solutions and moving on.
We do not want problems in our head, we want possibilities. 

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water - Rabindranath Tagore.

3) Food - Food is fuel. Food is healing.
Food, nature, abundance and roots offer comfort. They give you the ability to lean on something until you find the strength in your feet to get back up again. They offer support and care. They are kind and giving. Food is one of the most important things for humans in this world. Everyone is working hard every day to put food on their plate. When you grow your own vegetables or get the time to see people doing it for you (farming), bring that God given abundance home, cook it and serve it to yourself or to people around you, it fills you with gratitude. Food teaches us to have gratitude towards God, the Universe and towards farmers. Food makes you understand how hard work works. Food makes us understand how hard it is for all of us to survive.

Sadhguru (Jaggi Vasudev) once talked about problems in India in a Q&A. He narrated as follows (I have rephrased because I don’t remember the exact lines). In India, whenever someone is down or in a difficult situation, the first question they are asked is 'have you eaten? 'Because everyone understands that on an empty stomach, you cannot concentrate or focus, you forget to be thankful/grateful, you are grumpy and have a lot of complaints, and you cannot strive to achieve. Once you have eaten, half the problem is gone. Food - be it cooking, eating or feeding, takes away half the pain and problems. Food heals. 

The Characters, the Actors, the Director and the Writer:

 Kim Tae-ri, Ryu Jun-yeol, Jin Ki-joo and the supporting cast have given beautiful performances. Their characters were magical and lovely and so were the actors. You find solace in the journey of the characters in the movie. 

The movie served its purpose of telling a story that people could relate to, of putting across a message that everything that is broken can be mended and of creating a spark in the hearts of the people to dream to have a life that is similar to Hye-won’s. The movie makes us dream of wanting a life full of forgiveness, gratitude, abundance and healing and makes us strive to achieve that dream or goal.

The Director Im Soon-rye and the Writer Hwang Sung-goo have created a piece of art that resonates with people. With a duration of just 1 hour 43 minutes, the director and the writer have taken the audience on a healing journey. I have immense respect for them both for taking up a concept that is of paramount importance in today’s time. They have urged the audience to think beyond despair and distress and look at life for what it can offer, that is recreation, recovery, recuperation and revival. 

"The One that plants trees, knowing that he will never sit under their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life – Rabindranath Tagore". 

"Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love - Rabindranath Tagore."