InterviewFrom bar owner to village chief: director Lee Yu-jin’s ‘Manok’ puts middle-aged lesbian in charge

A poster for Lee Yu-jin's film "Manok," released in June in Korea / Courtesy of INDIESTORY

A middle-aged queer woman rarely leads Korean films, let alone cheerful political comedies set in a sleepy village. With “Manok” (2025), director Lee Yu-jin wanted to start right there — with what she calls an “imperfect hero” charging toward a “too much” happy ending.

Middle-aged queer hero

Lee began with a simple desire: make a queer comedy with a happy ending. Out of that goal, the idea of self-admitted “kkondae lesbian,” Manok, took shape.

Director Lee Yu-jin /Courtesy of INDIESTORY

“Stories about young queer characters often revolve around first love or identity crisis,” she said during an interview with The Korea Times, Tuesday.

“I was more interested in someone who has already lived as a queer person and now has to deal with everything else life throws at her.”

Equally important was avoiding the “model minority” trap that queer characters often fall into.

“I didn’t want her to be a good, exemplary person,” Lee said, mentioning that she has watched how real-life queer figures who come out publicly are often held to an unusually high moral standard.

“Why do you have to be perfect just to exist?” she asked. “I wanted to start with someone who can even seem unlikable or old-fashioned at first, and then let the audience slowly grow to understand and root for her.”

Why rural village, not Seoul

From the beginning, Lee knew she would avoid Seoul. Manok, played by Yang Mal-bok, is depicted as a former lesbian bar owner in the capital, but the real story starts when she returns to her conservative hometown in the fictional village of Iban-ri — coined after a term older Korean queer generations used to mean LGBTQ or “non-heterosexual” — after her mother’s death.

“I wanted a queer film set in the countryside, with a protagonist going back to the unsafe hometown she once left and stirring a ‘new wind’ there,” Lee said.

While traveling alone through rural areas, often staying in guesthouses, she noticed that village stories always seemed to converge on one figure: the “ijang,” or town chief.

“Wherever I went, people kept referring to the ijang,” she recalled. “They were the person who knew everything, did all the odd jobs and in a way served the whole village.”

That role, somewhere between neighborhood caretaker and gatekeeper, made the town chief election an irresistible device. Manok’s ex-husband, Cheol-ju, is the petty incumbent who wields that power. When he sabotages her attempts at a quiet life, she finally snaps and decides to run against him.

Setting the story in the Chungcheong region was deliberate.

Lee, who is from Cheonan in South Chungcheong Province, is fond of what she calls the area’s “soft but sharp” humor. “Cheongcheong people watch everything closely but don’t say it directly,” she said with a laugh. “There is this ambiguity and irony in the way they talk that fits comedy very well.”

She also liked that Chungcheong, unlike Jeolla or Gyeongsang, is rarely spotlighted in pop culture or political narratives. “There are so many beautiful small towns in Chungcheong area, but they don’t get the same attention as other regions,” she said, explaining that Manok’s story, which is also about someone overlooked, unfolds there.

A scene with Manok and her ex-husband Cheol-ju from the film "Manok" / Courtesy of INDIESTORY

Choosing laughter as weapon

Lee is candid about her own bias: “I like making people laugh,” she said.

But it was more than a personal preference. “When life is hard, people go to the cinema for action or comedy,” she said. “Queer people aren’t any different — they also just want something really funny to watch sometimes.”

As she researched village politics, queer communities and rural life, the script started to swell and darken. “I realized the film was drifting away from the original intention,” she said. “So I kept asking myself, ‘If I can do only one thing with Manok, what is it? The answer is to fill those two hours in the theater with gentle laughter.”

That meant cutting back on heavy exposition and treating research as raw material for comic situations rather than dramatic realism. “Ninety-nine percent of the village is fiction,” Lee said.

Details like “gangster” grandmothers zipping around on mobility scooters, or a fake speed bump that becomes a running gag, came from imaginative riffs on small observations and newspaper clippings.

Still, she is serious about what the laughter is aimed at. “Comedy can be violent,” she acknowledged, adding that what people find funny together can sometimes exclude others. With “Manok,” she constantly presents “safe laughs” — punching up, not down — and balanced Chungcheong-style deadpan with inside jokes from queer communities.

Manok campaigns for village chief in the film "Manok." Courtesy of INDIESTORY

Reflecting real LGBTQ lives

“Manok” nods to several realities of Korean queer life — the scarcity of safe spaces outside big cities, the precarity of queer bars, the weight of family and the trauma of being outed. At the film’s most dangerous moment, Cheol-ju publicly outs Manok to the village, a situation many queer Koreans fear.

Lee initially wrote a very detailed sequence in which Manok methodically persuades skeptical villagers to accept her. “There were long meetings, lots of dialogue, many problems being discussed and eventually an inauguration,” she said. “But then I asked myself, is it really the queer person’s job to convince everyone around them, one by one, that their identity is OK?”

Instead, she rewrote the climax around a local TV program featuring Manok in her capacity as a candidate.

“I realized that what she needed to do was her job as a would-be ijang, not a minority spokesperson,” Lee said. In that scene, Manok speaks frankly to her neighbors on their own platform, and the film leaves it to the audience to imagine the exact vote count. “If she works well, she’ll be reelected; if she abuses her power, she’ll be voted out,” Lee said. “That’s the same standard as everyone else, and that was more important than explaining how many people changed their minds about her sexuality.”

She is wary of being asked for a solution that no single story can provide.

“People sometimes want this film to show ‘how a queer person can become a politician (in Korea),’” she said. “But I don’t know that answer either. It depends on each individual and community, and it’s too heavy a burden to put on one character.”

A scene with Jae-yeon, a trans male teenager, in the film "Manok" / Courtesy of INDIESTORY

Casting with care

Alongside seasoned performers from the independent film and theater scene — including Yang Mal-bok, Kim Jung-young and Park Wan-gyu — Lee was determined to work with queer actors, especially for the roles closest to current youth.

She held an open call on social media specifically for queer performers to play Jae-yeon, a trans male teenager in the village.

“Way more people applied than I expected,” she said. That process led her to Sung Jae-yun, who is not a professional actor by training, but in Lee’s words, “has so much talent and charm.” Through an artist friend, she also met Sak-ja, a transgender performer who plays Sun-ah. For both, “Manok” was their first time acting on camera.

Far from being a symbolic gesture, Lee describes this casting choice as a practical directing decision. “If a cisgender actor played Jae-yeon, they would have to prepare 17 or 18 years of life experience they never lived, or rely on existing media portrayals,” she said. “With our budget and schedule, that kind of deep preparation was impossible — and we’d probably end up recreating stereotypes.”

By contrast, working with queer actors allowed certain scenes to become funny. Lee pointed to a moment when Sun-ah switched to a mock-authoritative voice in a bathroom confrontation. “If a cisgender male actor did that, it could easily feel offensive,” she said. “Because of who Sak-ja is, and how we built trust on set, it becomes something else.”

Actors and production staff review their work on a set, June 3, 2023. Courtesy of INDIESTORY

Audience reactions

Since premiering, “Manok” has drawn enthusiastic responses at film festivals and queer events at home and abroad. Several queer writers and activists helped turn post-film talks into an extra hour of joyful conversation. “Their excitement was higher than mine,” she said. “Seeing how much they wanted to spread the word made me work harder.”

Some messages have been more private and vulnerable. Viewers have written to tell her that, after watching the film, they finally came out to their parents or reconsidered how they see their own hometowns. Overseas, immigrant and diaspora audiences have told her that Iban-ri reminded them of the “home” they left behind, or imagined returning to one day. “It made me realize everyone has their own Iban-ri,” she said.

Lee makes it clear that she doesn’t see “Manok” as the template for queer representation in Korea. What she wants, she said, is simply more — and more varied — stories. “Queer film isn’t really a genre, but because there are so few works, ‘queer’ has become a label,” she said. “I’d love to see queer thrillers, queer mysteries, queer family dramas. I just want a wider range, as a viewer and a filmmaker.”

For now, she is writing a more personal independent film about loss and a friend’s death, and dreaming of future projects that mix comedy with mystery or family drama. But Manok’s neon-bright footsteps in a sleepy Chungcheong village may have already opened a small door.

She hopes that viewers — queer or not — leave the theater feeling “a little less alone.”

“Even if someone watches alone at a quiet morning screening, I want them to come out feeling a little less lonely,” she said. “Then I think Manok has done her job.”