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Thanks to a film festival sponsored by the International Rescue Committee in San Diego, I recently had a chance to see Yodok Stories, a documentary film on the making of the musical Yodok Story, which opened in Seoul in March 2006. Thanks to the Asia Society, the movie is coming to DC in mid-May.
The play and the film were both a collaboration between Norwegian documentary filmmaker Andrzej Fidyk and North Korean defector Jung Sung San. The film is a complement to rather than a substitute for the play because it introduces us to the nine North Korean refugees around which the play was constructed, including the indomitable choreographer Kim Young-sun. Seventy at the time the play was made, Kim had been a dancer and subsequently spent eight and a half years in Yodok in the 1970s. Other complex moments are provided by two refugees (Ahn Myung Chol and Lee Yung Kuk) who had been cogs in the North Korean machine (a prison guard and a member of Kim Jong Il’s security detail, respectively). The film also profiles Lee Min Bok, a missionary who has led one wing of the divided balloon movement; Mark McDonald has a good overview in the New York Times.
A theme of the movie is the lack of knowledge or interest about the gulag in the South. Needless to say, the play was a political football in South Korea; some old posts from the Marmot’s Hole detail the predictable left-right divisions. But whatever your political persuasion, there is little substitute for simply listening to the refugees talk about their lives.
DC Screening
Wednesday, May 18, 2011 @ 6:00pm-8:30pm
Hosted by: The Asia Society
Location: Asia Society Washington, The Cinnabar Room, Whittemore House, 2nd Floor, 1526 New Hampshire Ave, NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
RSVP to: [email protected]
