GV session with director Eunhee Lee, September 9, 2025 ⓒYang Munyoung

On August 9, the Gender and Labor Health Rights Center of the Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health (hereafter, the Gender Center) screened director Eunhee Lee’s films Machines Don’t Die (2022) and Colorless and Odorless (2024), followed by a GV session. This is a reflection on that event.
 


Do Not Film the Workers

Machines Don’t Die shows the process by which electronic components that have outlived their usefulness are recycled through the waste-processing industry. Mobile phones with shattered LCD screens, outdated computers—electronic devices once familiar to us—are crushed into pieces in recycling plants, where necessary elements such as gold are extracted.

Here, the concept of the “urban mine” appears: just as glittering minerals are mined from the earth, essential elements are extracted from electronic devices discarded as urban waste. The narrator speaks proudly of “zero waste,” yet the film presents visual evidence that waste and wastewater still remain in the recycling industry, making “zero waste” an unachievable ideal.

Director Eunhee Lee has said that she was initially interested in physical machines and materiality. However, she also recounted that when filming waste-processing plants, including during the production of Machines Don’t Die, there was a recurring instruction directed at her: “Do not film the workers.” When she shared this remark during the GV session, an audible sigh spread among the audience.

In the footage of waste-processing factories in Machines Don’t Die, workers barely appear. The near absence of working bodies feels strangely natural, reflecting how we fail to sense labor at all when we encounter products. This is not a phenomenon unique to Machines Don’t Die, but when filming factories, Lee explained that if people had to appear on screen, they were required to wear full protective gear that they would not normally wear, in order to obtain permission for filming (the safety warning signs shown in the film are strikingly clean, creating a sense of incongruity).

Lee said that the people she encountered while filming these sites remained as a kind of moral debt to her. This ethical concern regarding stories of people continues in her more recent works, Colorless and Odorless and Seomseomoksu (2025), which address labor and industrial accidents in the electronics industry through the voices of workers who are also victims and activists.


 
Smells That Do Not Carry Across

Machines Don’t Die features aqua regia (a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids) that dissolves “everything.” This substance, which dissolves anything it touches, is extremely dangerous, yet the acrid smell that instinctively makes one recoil, and the sensory awareness of accident risk, cannot be transmitted beyond the TV or cinema screen.

Both Machines Don’t Die and Colorless and Odorless bear traces of reflection on the limits of what visual media can convey. Some sensations are perceived through the skin or nose before they can be explained in words. Film is a medium limited to sight and sound. To approach the transmission of these other senses, the films intermix distorted images, altered colors, and visuals that feel vaguely nauseating.

Colorless and Odorless opens with a handwritten “clean note” (a work log notebook specialized for contamination prevention) bearing the name Hwang Yumi. From beginning to end, the film follows records of “people.” Early in the film, a worker who had worked in a semiconductor cleanroom recalls being fascinated by wearing “the protective suits seen on TV,” but then states that inside the process there was a “pervasive chemical smell” that television never showed.

Television conveys only sight and sound, amplifying some sensations while discarding others. The image of a pristine cleanroom and the corporate pride of Samsung are excessively conveyed through media. Sensations that do not translate into money or profit are discarded. Environments where adequate costs for safety were not paid, and production lines that had already produced many cancer patients in the West before relocating to Asia, were nowhere to be seen. Those traces were instead etched into workers’ bodies and memories, their lives, and their families.
 


Industrial and Environmental Disasters, and the Electronic Devices in My Hands

These stories could have been mine, or my family’s, or those of the region where I live. RCA, cited as an example in the film, was a major American electronics and telecommunications company. After struggles over severe environmental pollution in the United States during the 1960s, it relocated its factories to Taiwan in the 1970s.

At the Taiwanese RCA plant, not only were workers exposed to toxic substances, but dormitories and groundwater around the factory were also contaminated. More than 1,000 workers developed various forms of cancer. Rather than reciting statistics, the film conveys the voices of survivors who became activists: dreaming of a particular person for two consecutive nights meant that person would die soon; the constant fear of discovering one had cancer.

The electronics industry knows no borders. In addition to RCA, the film includes testimonies from workers who supplied companies such as Apple and ASUS. Countless forms of labor went into transforming raw materials into these products. The labor and pride of women workers in the electronics industry, along with severe menstrual pain, miscarriages, and impacts on children’s health. If, every time we bought these products, we had to fully bear and sense the memories of industrial and environmental disasters, would they still sell as they do now? The film insists on recalling the sensations and memories erased by capital and by structures that trivialize the ill health of women workers.


 
Even If Seen Less, As My Own Story

In Colorless and Odorless, activist Kwon Young-eun of SHARPS (Supporters for the Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry) reflects on what kinds of experiences draw public attention. She notes that people have tended to respond more to cases involving greater pain and longer suffering. Yet she hopes these stories will be understood not as someone else’s suffering, but as “my own story”—shared by all of us who use electronic devices, as neighbors and implicated individuals—even if that means they are seen less, at least for now.

Jung Hyang-suk, a former Samsung worker diagnosed with a rare disease and now a SHARPS activist, recalls how she used her salary to enjoy “eating good food with her child,” traveling, and how she “liked” those aspects of her working life. These are sensations everyone shares, yet certain workplaces impose far greater risks on workers without informing them. All of our lives are indebted, in part, to hidden risks and illnesses. I take into myself that shared wish—that while working diligently, neither my life, nor my family’s, nor my children’s lives be damaged by unseen dangers.

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