“Most of the film had to be kept secret for the past years.”

So says the director of a new South Korean film about a North Korean orphan living secretly in China.

“Crossing,” a story directed by Kim Tae-gyun and starring Korean TV star Cha In-pyo, depicts an 8,000 km arduous and lonely journey made by an 11-year-old North Korean boy in search of his coal-miner father who ended up defecting to South Korea. [….]

“I had to be very cautious in making this film because of the political sensitivity of the defector issue,” Kim said during a news conference in which part of the incomplete film was open to media for the first time. [The Hankyoreh]

Secret from whom? Please tell me he doesn’t mean the South Korean government. He doesn’t quite say it.

That would mean that tens of thousands of us served in uniform to protect this nominally free country where a democratically elected government led by a former “human rights lawyer” censored media discussion, whether fictionalized or documentary, of the world’s gravest human rights violations, but subsidized fictionalized accounts of American atrocities and missteps, accounts where considerable dramatic license had to be taken for maximum demagogic effect.

It’s not as if this is the first we knew of the Roh Administration acting as a proxy North Korean censor, blocking demonstrations, or trying to putinize the media, but this sudden deluge of new information about North Korean refugees — all of which evidently had to hide until Lee Myung Bak’s inauguration — is pretty remarkable for what it says about (the absence of) free speech in Roh’s Korea. Doesn’t that all sound vaguely … fascist?

If talking about human rights in North Korea is the new political fad, it’s a fad I suppose I can live with.

More on the film, “Crossing,” at the Daily NK. See also GI Korea’s take.

Update:   There’s more information about “Crossing” and a video clip here.  It didn’t play on my computer, but I liked these pictures, including stills from the film.  For the record, the makers of the film are not saying that the South Korean government tried to interfere with the film’s  production or release, although they do say that the North Koreans did. 

3 Responses

  1. i’m really hoping this movie does what Yoduk Story (though not really any fault of its own other than timing) failed to do — i’m hoping it achieves at least some measure of popularity in the South. the climate/분위기 here seems to be thawing a bit so maybe, just maybe, it’s possible. (are we seeing the first signs of spring, like in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?)

  2. I think the reason Yoduk Story didn’t have a significant impact on South Korea’s political climate is that most people hate musicals.

    Musicals haven’t really had much impact since the rise of modern cinema. You can probably trace the precise moment of that transition to Berlin in the 1930’s, when Josef Von Sternberg and Fritz Lang left for Hollywood, one step ahead of the Nazis, and on to great success and acclaim, and Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weil went East, toward Stalin’s USSR and eventually, gilded captivity and early graves in East Germany.

    Just look at what movies can do artistically that musicals can’t: close-ups, re-takes, and special effects to name a few. We ordinary mortals get used to those things. Also, the music tends to be less annoying. Look, I went into Yoduk Story expecting a crashing bore and was fantastically relieved that I didn’t hate it and that no one fell down during a dance number. I’m otherwise too unqualified to judge YS’s artistic merits and didn’t try. I suspect most people are as unsophisticated about the theatahhh as I am.

    We know that there’s some great cinematic talent in Korea these days. Let’s hope it’s put to good use for a change.

  3. As someone who likes musicals/theater, especially ones that have emotional/heartfelt music(my favorite musical is “Les Miserables”), I have heard good things about Yoduk Story and wished I could have seen it when it was in the U.S. What is the latest news on the musical? Any upcoming showings anywhere? As for this movie, I hope it does well. It is good to know that some people are using there artist talents to help make people more aware of the lack of human rights in North Korea and the refugees.