Healer | Cheongju Culture Factory — The Tobacco Plant the Director Could Not Leave

Director Lee Jung-sub had already shot Baker King Kim Tak-goo and Glory Jane in Cheongju. When Healer came around he scouted Gyeonggi and Paju and still came back. He said the old tobacco factory would not leave his head.

The KT&G Cheongju plant ran from 1946 until the last cigarette left in 2004. The brick sheds sat empty, then became Munhwajejochang, the Culture Factory. MMCA Cheongju opened inside the same envelope in 2018. The conservation rooms are public. The lawn in front used to be a loading yard.

In late 2014 the production used this industrial carcass as one of Cheongju's working locations, along with the open set built for Seo Jung-hoo's house. You cannot walk into that house now. You can walk into the factory. The chimneys and long brick walls still read as a place that once made something at scale and then stopped.

A night courier story needed rooms that looked used. This plant had decades of use already in the mortar. Stand on Sangdang-ro 314 and the building is no longer a rumor from a press visit. It is a museum that kept the factory's bones.