A Korean Folktale Transported to Modern-Day New York
Lee Isaac Chung’s Abigail Harm — which won Best Feature and Best Director at the 2013 LA Asian Pacific Film Festival — stars Amanda Plummer as a lonely woman who captures a heavenly creature to be her loyal companion.
by Ada Tseng
“The first image I had in mind when writing the script was of a deer running through a run-down hallway in a New York City apartment,” says director Lee Isaac Chung, about his third feature Abigail Harm, starring Amanda Plummer, Tetsuo Kuramochi, Will Patton, and Burt Young.
The story is inspired by the Korean fable “The Woodcutter and the Nymph,” in which a woodcutter saves a deer and in return, the deer grants him one wish. In Chung’s fantastical, modern-day adaptation, Abigail Harm (Plummer) is a lonely woman who spends her days reading to the blind. Will Patton plays the wounded man she rescues, the “deer” that grants Abigail her wish to love and be loved.
“I try to stay true to these images,” continues Chung, “so I treated it as a crucial shot, even if it was a nightmare.”
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Ada Tseng 