With the birth of the first female champion in 2009, female wrestlers expect to have official competitions and business teams. In the next 10 years, five female wrestlers who overcame unpopular sports and survived struggle to become Ssireum champions.

This is a story about sandstorm-raising wrestlers. It records the journeys of five wrestlers who were part of the strongest Korean women’s wrestling team in 2017. The five competitors documented their paths as wrestlers until 2021. The stories of each wrestler flow in order, but they are not separated into individual pieces. As Song Songhwa says, wrestling is a “gentle exercise that involves close contact with the opponent’s breath”, and especially in women’s wrestling, regardless of the weight class or rating, it is a place of sisterhood and affection, where they consider each other as sisters. Therefore, their stories revolve around how they become role models for each other, the choices they make to improve their own skills in this context, the challenges they face as female wrestlers, what it means to achieve great things and what kind of life they will live after their wrestling careers end. Thus, Sandstorm can be considered a documentary about “living as a female wrestler”, rather than just about the sport of “women’s wrestling” itself. (Rhana JANG)