Parasite | Changsin-dong Steps — The Middle of the Long Fall

In the rain sequence the family keeps going down through a city that keeps getting lower. Changsin-dong is the middle of that fall: steep residential steps threading between houses stacked on the western slope below Naksan.

The alley is 지봉로11길, in Jongno-gu. Public, open, unmarked. Korea Tourism lists it among the film's locations; nothing on site does.

Changsin-dong is a sewing district. For decades the small workshops here cut and stitched the clothes that were sold two kilometres downhill in the Dongdaemun markets — a whole industry running out of ground-floor rooms and basements on a hill too steep for trucks, served by men on motorbikes carrying fabric rolls taller than they are. That is why the streetscape looks the way the film needed it to look. Nobody designed it as a set for poverty; it is the shape a manufacturing neighbourhood takes when it grows on a slope.

The district has been in and out of redevelopment plans for years. Some blocks are protected as an urban-regeneration area, others are not. Expect the streetscape to differ from any photograph older than a season.

Same rules as Ahyeon-dong: people live and work behind these windows, so keep it quiet and keep your camera off the doorways.

Come on a weekday morning and you will hear sewing machines through open windows most of the way up. That sound is the reason the place looks like this, and it is the one thing the film could not put in the frame.