TEAM

Director / Producer

Amy Saeeun Baek

Amy Saeeun Baek is a Korean-Canadian producer and director working between South Korea and Canada. Her work centres on intimate, relationship-driven documentaries that explore identity, migration, and belonging, often through the lives of people who exist at the margins. Drawing from her own experience of living between cultures, she is interested in how people who feel alienated from the world around them search for a place to call home. Her debut feature documentary, "Glorious Holiday" (2022), was funded by CBC Short Docs, premiered on CBC Gem, and was an official selection at the Los Angeles Asian Film Awards. It won Best Documentary at the 2023 Mosaic Festival of Arts and Culture. Her short documentary "Our Second Fridge" (2020) received the Excellence Award at EIDF’s Mini Doc Competition, reflecting her interest in finding larger human stories within the details of everyday life. Through years of independent research and filming across countries for "One Way to Mars", she follows the scattered traces of Ulymar’s life, gradually uncovering a story far stranger and more intimate than the one that first drew her in.

Dop / editor

Heewon Choi

Heewon Choi is a South Korea-based cinematographer specialising in documentary filmmaking. With a background in film, he approaches cinematography through close observation of people and spaces, shaping a visual narrative from the organic connections between individual scenes. He has served as director of photography on more than 15 short films and worked on commercial and institutional projects for Samsung, Hanwha, LG, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, as well as international non-scripted productions in Japan, the United States, India, and France. His credits include "Let Them Dance" (2023), a WATCHA original documentary series, and "Dreamator" (2025), which screened at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival. For Heewon, cinematography is not simply about creating striking images, but about building a story layer by layer, like laying bricks, until each scene contributes to a cohesive whole. On "One Way to Mars", he brings this patient, observational approach to a story shaped by memory, absence, and the traces a person leaves behind.

Research & Production Coordinator

Sanghoon Kim

Sanghoon is a filmmaker studying at Seoul Institute of the Arts, where he directs short films and music videos. His work explores the tension between individual emotions and collective norms, paying attention to how unspoken feelings surface through people’s actions, gestures, and surroundings. His short film "Colorfall" (2026), which he wrote and directed, received Best Film at the institute’s student film showcase and was screened at the Gyeonggi Film School Festival and the Verona International Short Film Festival Online Showcase. His most recent short film as a director, "idk (idontknow)" (2026), further reflects his ongoing work in narrative filmmaking. His documentary "Joy, Anger, Sorrow, and Rock" (2018) screened in the Youth Section of the 10th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, where it received the Audience Award. On "One Way to Mars", Sanghoon supports the project’s research and production, organising archival materials, coordinating interview outreach, and assisting on set. His work helps connect the fragments of Ulymar’s life and keeps the practical and investigative sides of the production moving forward.

Animator

Hwanyi Kim

Hwanyi Kim is a Korean visual artist working in drawing and 2D stop-motion animation. She holds a BA in Painting from Dongguk University in Seoul and an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in Seoul, London, and Tokyo, and screened at international festivals including Seoul Indie-AniFest, Animateka, and Sunday Shorts Film Festival. Drawing on her own experience of isolation, she explores social disconnection and emotional pain with humour and empathy. Her distinctive process involves erasing and redrawing charcoal images frame by frame, allowing traces of earlier drawings to remain beneath each new image. These marks become metaphors for the wounds left by difficult experiences. In "One Way to Mars", Hwanyi’s animation offers a way to approach the parts of Ulymar’s inner world that photographs and archival records cannot fully reveal, giving visual form to the imagination, memories, and emotions that remain beyond the reach of the camera.