The above words – drawn from Salman Rushdie's short story about the famous footwear worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (US, 1939) – find the author in a reflective mood. No stranger to the kind of emotional upheaval and cultural displacement literally ‘weathered’ by Dorothy in her picaresque rite of passage from sepia-toned Kansas to kaleidoscopic Oz, Rushdie slips from reverie to rhetorical yearning, and evokes – in his description of a ‘scattered’ and ‘damaged’ home – a sentiment that has become increasingly salient in South Korean cinema. It should come as no surprise that this Holy Grail of movie memorabilia, this fetishised pair of magic slippers which first enticed the exiled writer as a young boy in Bombay, emblematically figures in a millennial film that similarly revolves around departure and return, migration and habitation. As suggested by its English-language title, Asako in Ruby Shoes (Sunaebo, 2000) is a ‘hymn … to Elsewhere’, one that plunders the iconography of a Hollywood classic so as to reformulate such perennial themes as alienation, desire and boredom in the context of another geospatial imaginary.