Experiencing Interruptions?

UMMA

A purple‑haired singer relives her entire life with her blonde mother inside an ordinary Korean living room, from chaotic childhood and rebellious teenage years to first love, failures, and independence. When her mother falls ill and passes away, the daughter only truly understands that love after becoming a mother herself, cradling her own child in the same space. Blending AI‑generated visuals with a global chorus of the word “mother” in many languages, the lyric film becomes a quiet, universal elegy for maternal love and the grief of letting it go.

  • K-garoo
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Music Video
  • Runtime:
    3 minutes 56 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 30, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    420 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    South Korea
  • Country of Filming:
    South Korea
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    AI gen tools 100%
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - K-garoo

Heewoon Lee studied Public Policy at the University of Tokyo and Business Administration at Seoul National University.

Before entering the creative field, he lived and worked across several countries, spending years in military and multinational environments — a life of constant movement and quiet observation.

Having experienced both belonging and estrangement on different continents, he began translating these emotional undercurrents into art and sound.

His creative career in music and film started in 2024, exploring the intersection of human emotion, technology, and poetic storytelling under the project name K-garoo.

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Director Statement

I grew up speaking many words for “mother,” but never quite learned how to say thank you. For most of my life I treated her love like background noise: always on, always there, even when I slammed doors, failed jobs, and disappeared into other cities and screens.​

UMMA began as a lyric, then became a house, a living room, a lifetime folded into a few square meters of Korean apartment light. With AI, I could bend time inside that room — watching a purple‑haired daughter and a blonde mother grow older, fight, forgive, and finally separate — until grief turned into a loop, not an ending.​

The film uses machine‑generated images and a multilingual chorus of “엄마 / Mama / Madre / mẹ…” to stitch together all the mothers I have known and never properly seen. In letting an artificial system redraw the most human relationship in my life, I wanted to ask: if memory is unreliable and images are synthetic, can the feeling of a mother’s touch still be real enough to save us?