General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

A Hometown in My Heart

A Hometown in My Heart (마음의 고향, Maeumui gohyang, also translated A Hometown in Heart or Hometown of the Heart) is a 1949 South Korean drama film directed by Yun Yong-gyu, adapting playwright Ham Se-deok's play A Little Monk (동승, Tongseung). It tells of a child monk in a mountain temple who longs for the mother who abandoned him, and it is regarded as one of the most important Korean films made between liberation from Japanese colonial rule and the outbreak of the Korean War.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	마음의 고향 (Maeumui gohyang)¹
Source	Ham Se-deok's play A Little Monk (동승), awarded in a 1939 Tonga Ilbo competition and published in 1947 under the title Tongseung³
Release	February 9, 1949, by Dong-Seo Film Production Company; 76–78 minutes, black-and-white 35mm²
Principal cast	Choi Eun-hee, Yu Min, Byun Ki-jong⁴
Survival	Lost during the Korean War; a 16mm print returned from France in 1993, a 35mm element found in Japan in 2005, 4K restoration completed in 2022¹
Heritage status	The 35mm dupe negative was designated a National Registered Cultural Heritage in 2007¹

Spoilers

Plot

Do-seong is a novice monk, abandoned by his mother as a baby and raised in a small mountain temple by the head monk, a distant relative. He has never seen his mother but misses her constantly, and the older monks and villagers keep that hope alive by telling him stories about her.⁵^•²

A young widow comes to the temple to hold a memorial service for her own dead son, who died at about Do-seong's age. The boy feels her maternal affection, and she grows to love him as a son and asks the head priest to let her adopt him. The priest refuses, explaining that Do-seong's karma is too strong for him to live outside the temple. When Do-seong's biological mother appears at the temple, conflict follows, but for the child's future she leaves without revealing herself.⁵^•⁶

The decisive turn is a small moral event. On the day the widow is to take Do-seong down the mountain, it is discovered that he has trapped and killed a bird, which he had set in the forest intending to make his mother a feather fan. The head monk thereupon refuses to send him out into the world. Do-seong later learns that his biological mother had visited, and he leaves the temple to find her, walking down the mountain path.⁶^•²

Production and source

The film adapts Ham Se-deok's play, originally titled To-nyeom after its main character, which won a prize in a competition held by the Tonga Ilbo newspaper in 1939 and was included in a 1947 anthology of Ham's plays as Tongseung (Child Monk); this was the version used for the 1949 screenplay.³ The screenplay credit is given to Kwak Il-pyeong, with cinematography by Han Hyeong-mo and music by Pak Hye-il.⁴

Yun Yong-gyu had learned filmmaking in Japan, including experience as an assistant to director Toyoda Shiro, and A Hometown in My Heart was his directorial debut.⁷^•⁸ It was produced by Dong-Seo Film Production Company and released on February 9, 1949, in a period when the Korean industry produced about twenty films that year.² After the war began, Yun fled to North Korea, where he continued working as a director.⁷

Reception and significance

At the time of its release the film was considered one of the best works of the liberation period, and it won the film section of the first Seoul City Culture Award in 1949.¹^•⁹ The role made Choi Eun-hee a popular star.⁸ When South Korea chose a film for a cultural exchange with France, it was this film that went to French shores in return for Chanson du Reves; it screened for five days in June 1949 and then remained in France.²^•³

Scholars have read the film in several registers. It is said to be the first Korean Buddhist film, and its Buddhism-related symbols, including the Heart Sutra and red lotus imagery, have been interpreted as representing Korean tradition while the supporting characters stand for the social and political forces pulling at post-liberation Korea's young generation.¹⁰ Critics of Korean literary cinema describe it as an archetype of the genre, built on long shots and long takes that carry a theme of harmony between beautiful nature and human affairs, with the director's observational stance lending the story a tragic romantic quality.⁷ A 2025 study places the film beside North Korea's My Hometown (1949) as one of two 'hometown' films that appeared on either side of the newly divided peninsula in the same year, each constructing an ideologically charged landscape of national origin.¹¹

Loss and restoration

The film was lost during the Korean War, one of the conflicts that nearly destroyed early Korean cinema.¹^•² Its survival came through two channels. In 1993 the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) acquired a 16mm print from producer Lee Gang-su (Yi Kang-su), who had been living in France and was the sole carrier of the original print.¹^•³ In 2005 a 35mm master positive was acquired from Japan's National Film Center, now the National Film Archive of Japan, giving the archive a strong preservation basis.¹

KOFA's restoration team scanned the film at 4K resolution in 2019, using the 35mm master positive and a release print for the images, and completed intensified digital restoration of damaged parts, sound restoration, and color grading in 2020 and 2022; image restoration was handled by Image Power Station Co., Ltd.⁵ The restored version runs 76 minutes, though some international documentation lists 78 minutes.¹²

Later versions

Director Stanley Park (Park Young-chul) remade the story in 2014 as A Hometown In My Heart (내 마음의 고향), a 100-minute drama released in South Korea on November 27, 2014, crediting Yun Yong-gyu's 1949 film as its original.¹³ A separate 2002 film, A Little Monk directed by Ju Gyeongjung, has also been discussed alongside the 1949 original in scholarship on Korean Buddhist cinema.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026