“What the Mountain kept for more than 300 million years, humans took in less than a century”. On the scale of geological time, everything dissolves. Memory becomes fragmented, wrinkled, and the limits between the living and the dead blur together.

“La Koreana” is a film that came about with the crossover between personal memory and geological memory, between bodies that resist and rocks that remember. Set in a mining mountain in the Basque Country that has been brutally exploited since the late 19th century, the film interlinks three times and multiple languages—visual, sound, physical and historical—to explore how mining in the region and work shaped not only the landscape, but also how we remember and inhabit the past.

“La Koreana” is also a place for reflection for those who live there: “Where do you keep the memory of a people?” the miners ask amidst the ruins. I ask how our memory continues to alter both the past and the future.

It is a physical, political and deeply sensory work committed to a kind of cinema where emotion and form are inseparable, where the human and the geological unite into a single force of resistance.