In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Past Is a Strange Country (Kwagŏ nŭn nassŏn narada)
  • Kyu Hyun Kim
The Past Is a Strange Country (Kwagŏ nŭn nassŏn narada) written and directed by Kim Eung-soo (Kim Ŭngsu). South Korea. A Kim Se-jin/Yi Chae-ho Commemoration Project Committee Production, with the assistance from the Korean Film Council, 2008. 90 minutes.1

“And then in a flash he just . . . burned.”

In the documentary The Past Is a Strange Country (Kwagŏ nŭn nassŏn narada), an interviewee has been calmly recounting the circumstances leading up to his college friend Lee Jae-ho’s (Yi Chaeho’s) horrid self-immolation—an event he witnessed more than twenty years ago. Upon uttering the above words, however, he bursts into tears in a manner that shocks both in its suddenness and plaintiveness. This and many other powerful, challenging scenes make the film (whose title references David Lowenthal’s study on the myriad modes and sites of historical remembrance) one of the best documentaries on Korea’s turbulent post-colonial history. That is no small feat considering that since the late 1980s South Korea has produced an impressive body of politically charged documentaries that explore the country’s modern experience, especially from the perspectives of the oppressed or marginalized. Filmmakers have reflected upon, for example, the dark side of the country’s impressive economic growth in Kim Dong-won’s (Kim Tongwŏn) Sanggyedong Olympics (1988); the long-forgotten plight of former comfort women in Byun Young-joo’s (Pyŏn Yŏngju) series: The Murmuring (Najŭn moksori, 1995), Habitual Sadness (Najŭn moksori 2, 1997), and My Own Breathing (Samgyŏl, 1999); and the pernicious effects of lingering social prejudices including still-pervasive male chauvinism and homophobia in Choi Hyun-jung’s (Ch’oe Hyŏnjŏng) Being Normal (P’yŏngbŏm-hagi, 2002). In the last decade, a handful of “star” documentarians have emerged, whose works, despite low budgets and occasional rough edges, have managed to command critical respect as well as box office clout among South Korean viewers. A case in point is Kim Dong-won and his film Repatriation (Songhwan, 2004), a liberalminded— some might say pro–North Korean—look at Communist prisoners of conscience who were incarcerated for more than fifty years in Southern prisons for refusing to recant their beliefs, only to be “repatriated” in 2000 to the North. Despite the richness and range characterizing this growing corpus of cinematic [End Page 151] takes on history, The Past Is a Strange Country nonetheless manages to stand out in terms of content, form, and effect.

To begin with, its content is intimately intertwined with the life story of its director, Kim Eung-soo. Born in 1966, he was a student leader at Seoul National University, an important site of the 1980’s student movement that many credit with helping lay the foundations of Korea’s democracy today. His debut film, The Time Lasts Long (Sigan ŭn orae chisok toenda, 1996), is a somber, Tarkovskian black-and-white film—partly based on his own experience— that explores the lives of the Korean student activists who moved to Russia in the 1980s. Kim seems to be intensely aware of the political complacency in post-authoritarian Korean society, but his films avoid the familiar types of social critique seen in the works of more commercially successful directors with leftist inclinations. That is, his works evince little of the pedantic and elitist tone often found in politically conscious cinema of Korea—notably, in the films of Im Sang-soo and to an extent even in Kim Dong-won’s supremely humanistic documentaries.

The Past Is a Strange Country consists entirely of interview footage of former activists recalling the self-immolation suicides of two Seoul National University students—the aforementioned Lee and Kim Se-jin—in April 1986. Interviewees appear on screen, except in one instance when only a voice is heard, and the final witness turns out to be director Kim himself (interviewed by an assistant). The film eschews virtually all the usual dramatic elements found in the historical documentary genre: voice-over narration, incidental music, reenactments, and editing techniques...

pdf

Share