Lee Gong-hee has a long work history in?and surrounding?the film industry and finally, in her middle 50s, she making her directorial debut feature. And the reason for the long wait may be embedded in Sound of Memories’s narrative. This experimental film trades in the memories of a woman confronting her elder sister′s suicide. As the past becomes clearer, she finds herself becoming more like her sister. She takes her elder sister’s lover as her own, and sinks further into her dead sister’s life. Sinking is the film’s driving theme. <Sound of Memories> features a film within a film, whose director is the narrator of Lee’s work.That director reflects the dead woman’s recollections as she relates herself to the imaginary film’s characters. The result includes hallucinatory visions and voices, and increasing obsessions for the living sister. The memories captured by the film, perhaps the obsession, are creating the “sound of memory.” At a time when abstractionism and idealism are being suffocated in the cinema, any experiment in the same is a welcome endeavor. (JEON Chanil)