Inseon recounts how a newspaper photograph of unearthed remains—a body curled on its side, knees drawn to chest, still wearing small rubber shoes—gripped her. Believing the person had been buried while still alive, she clipped the picture and began lying under her desk in the same posture. She decided her next film would search for this unnamed victim's identity, intending to begin with a low-key interview of her mother, framed only from the neck down.

Arriving at her mother's home in Jeju, Inseon attempted to record practice footage by the limewashed wall but found herself unexpectedly speaking about her father and the cave, repeatedly until her batteries died. The next dawn she crossed the dry stream to the abandoned village across, unable to identify where her father's childhood home had stood.

Inseon then narrates her father's history: at nineteen, hiding in caves at his father's insistence to avoid police roundups, doting on his infant sister Eunyoung. One November night he watched soldiers burn the village, herd his family away, and execute seven people including his grandfather at the hackberry tree. He buried his father with bamboo leaves and dirt before being captured a week later, imprisoned, and sent to Mokpo. The rounded-up villagers, including infants, were later shot dead on a nearby beach.

Inseon reveals none of this appears in the film—only the cave's darkness made it in. Her mother told her these things only as her memory began to fade. Inseon retrieves a box of books, booklets, and a photo of her parents, showing Kyungha researched testimonies of an elderly woman who, as a young mother, witnessed the beach massacre through a hole in her window paper. The woman described soldiers shooting villagers in groups of ten and throwing bodies into the sea.

A final, later interview reveals the woman's deeper story: her husband had served the police as an interpreter during the evacuations, refused to touch their baby afterward, and hated the rebels. Fifteen years after the killings, a stranger appeared asking if she had seen children on the beach, or a baby washed ashore. Trembling and sweat-soaked, he could not even take the water she offered before vanishing, leaving her forever uncertain whether she had been waiting or paralyzed.