Night Swimming Club
The programmer's note
A Segla original, and a proof of concept in the honest sense: Park is showing a financier that the world works. Nine minutes, almost all of it wet. What convinced us was the sound. Above the surface it is a Tuesday in Los Angeles, below it is a room. Watch what the film does with the sensor light at the deep end, which is the entire premise explained without a line of exposition. We want the feature.
The film
Water in this Los Angeles is metered at the pool, not the tap. Every backyard has a float sensor that reports volume and temperature to an account, and a small industry has grown in the gap between what a sensor knows and what it can prove. Ha-eun runs a list. She knows which houses are empty, which sensors report hourly, and which owners are in Palm Springs until Sunday. Marco services the sensors for a living. They meet at three in the morning in a pool on a street above Glassell Park, and the film is the forty minutes before the water goes cold, compressed into nine. Park shoots almost entirely in and under the water, with the city audible above the surface as a low continuous hum and gone the moment a head goes under. This is a proof of concept for a feature, and it is built to demonstrate one thing: that the world holds up when you put two people inside it and let them talk.
