“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.