I was working at the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY) when we hosted a screening for Goddess Era (여신시대) on March 19, 2026. While checking in guests, I explained to the audience that this documentary was about Jeju Island’s Haenyeo (women divers) and the spiritual aspect of their labor. When I entered the theater, however, I was confused: the film was nothing like what I had described. My initial thought was that I had misread the description—but I had not. The brochure clearly stated the film was about Haenyeo.

The real problem happened after the screening. Several audience members approached KCCNY staff—myself included—to complain about the mismatch between the film’s description and its actual content. Some insisted we had screened the wrong film entirely. As I had not been involved in the curation process and had not seen the film in full, I had no immediate answer. It was only when my boss explained afterward that I understood: the directors had provided the synopsis about Haenyeo, and although my boss was aware that it did not reflect the film, the directors had confirmed it. A day later, I was still receiving complaints about our center’s lack of professionalism and the absence of any prior notification about the film replacement, neither of which was our doing.

This documentary film attempts to connect Korean goddess worship, women’s agency throughout history, and the experiences of women in present-day Korea. Specifically, the film draws on the life of Na Hyesŏk—a pioneering artist and writer active during the Japanese colonial period—alongside goddess worship traditions and present-day women, such as a female firefighter. Having not watched the film entirely, to be honest, I hesitate to offer a full review. The connections between these subjects, however, feel superficial as the film juxtaposes women’s narratives without fully articulating what binds them. Na Hyesŏk, for instance, is a figure whose life and work have been richly examined by scholars on their own terms; linking her to goddess worship risks locating her complexity into a generic figure of femininity. The AI-generated images and animation further disrupt the documentary’s overall structure. Combined with what feel like arbitrarily staged interview setups, these images do not match the flow of the film, leaving its purpose unclear. The directors appear to have wanted to trace a sacred continuity of women’s history—from goddess worship to the modern, everyday lives of women—but whether that continuity remains an open question.

The directors’ deliberately inaccurate synopsis, describing a film about Haenyeo when the film is about something different, may have intended to push the audience to extend their thinking toward Jeju Haenyeo and situate the film within a wider feminist discourse in Korea. In this reading, the Haenyeo serve as a conceptual bridge after watching the film rather than the film’s actual subject. This strategy is not entirely unfamiliar; artists have long used the deliberate gap between what a work promises and what it delivers as a tool of critical engagement.

The deliberate discrepancy between a work’s synopsis and its actual content is not a new strategy. Paratext, including the title, synopsis, and program notes, frames and guides how audiences approach a work of art. When the paratext subverts expectation, the resulting discomfort of feeling deceived pushes the audience to think critically and view the work with distance. Cliff Cardinal’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It is one example of this: introduced as a retelling of a Shakespeare classic, the play seems at first to deliver on that promise before the play starts—but as Cardinal takes the stage and delivers his monologue, the audience slowly realizes it is not a Shakespearean adaptation at all, but a deliberately paratextual work that confronts current political issues. (When I saw the play in January 2024, there was a fight between Mr. Cardinal and one of the audiences. The audience left the theater after having a quarrel, and I thought Mr. Cardinal wisely used this situation like a part of play, besides from the fact that whether I like the play or not) By betraying audience expectations under the guise of a classical play, Cardinal successfully conveys his concerns about social justice and political inequality—borrowing the cultural authority of Shakespeare to make that confrontation land harder.

Goddess Era employs a similar paratextual technique, but it raises the question of whether this constitutes genuine critical misdirection. First, the KCCNY was not a proper venue for an experimental screening considering the audience. Its visitors are not always film-oriented; many come simply to experience Korean culture for the first time. Even if the directors intended to leverage the KCCNY’s institutional authority, subverting a government cultural center only becomes meaningful when the audience is considered—or when the subversion directly confronts something like state violence against women, giving the experiment real stakes. Second, while the film attempts to convey a specific political direction, it stays within the documentary form without interrogating it. This misdirection ends up producing a fictional imaginary rather than illuminating reality, which ironically undermines both the documentary form and the political message the film seems to pursue. Although the film’s metaphysical ambition, tracing a spiritual continuity across time through imagination with visualization, might be justifiable even within a documentary form, Goddess Era fails to visually persuade its audience of these connections. The only common thread holding these narratives together remains a reductive notion of womanhood, with too many directions left open to the viewer. The paratextual attempt to expand perception ultimately tries to carry too much at once.

Overall, the screening of Goddess Era at the KCCNY was a bold attempt, using paratextual misdirection to draw attention to Korea’s long-neglected goddess worship tradition and to put it together with a feminist approach toward broader questions of reality and representation. The strategy of deliberate unfamiliarity, however, does not fully succeed. The film asks its audience to weave together too many threads at once—goddess worship, women’s historical agency, and contemporary experience of women—and then adds yet another layer through the Haenyeo synopsis, asking viewers to extend their critical thinking even further. That evening, I stood between the directors’ experimental intent and an audience that simply felt misled, receiving complaints about a wrong film—a scene that, in itself, reflected everything the film could not resolve. The attempt and the message were not wrong, but the gap between what the film promised and what it delivered remained, in the end, just a gap.