Yoonseok looked at the laptop screen over and over again. He still couldn’t believe it; he got the judges’ award.

He received the email two days ago. An email with an English title was at the top of his inbox. Just as he was about to trash it thinking that it was a scam, he found the sender’s address rather familiar. Even as someone who had lived a life far removed from learning English, he had no problems reading it:

Monte Brè.

Three months ago, he submitted his film to various film festivals through various online platforms, and one of them was Monte Brè, a film festival with an illustrious history that was held in Switzerland. 

He clicked on the title of the email quickly. He copied the slew of English text and pasted them into a machine translator. Although some of the ‘translations’ were jaggy at best, he had no problem understanding the meaning.

At the end was a line that said that they were happy to screen a good film at their festival and congratulated him for getting the award.

He immediately sent the whole email to a friend of his who was good at English. He said he would treat him out later in compensation for an accurate translation. The contents that his friend translated into Korean for him weren’t that much different...