Korean film revives tragic – and fading – memory
In a controversial retelling, 'May 18' looks at the Kwangju crackdown in 1980 by South Korea's military dictatorship.
from the July 9, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Still, the movie, produced by CJ Entertainment, Korea's largest film company, perpetuates the mystique of a tragedy that's been dramatized on TV, in documentaries, and in one movie that focuses on the suffering of a victim.
Members of the audience were weeping after one of the screenings that I attended, and the stars were treated like heroes for dying heroically on film.
The innocence of ordinary civilians willing to fight for their beliefs exemplifies the idealism that leftists today say is needed to keep democracy alive – and to expel American troops.
"The general mood of the film was right," says Chi Jung Nam, who is from south of Kwangju and knew people there at the time of the assault. "People will look at Kwangju in a new light. The younger generation will want to learn."
Still, Mr. Chi, a journalist, worries about the action-packed telling of the story.
In the film, the rebels, led by a fictitious former colonel, revel in defiance and mayhem. Troops fire point-blank into a boisterous crowd – minutes of carnage that didn't happen that way. "Too much dramatization," says Chi. The director, Kim Ji Hoon, he says, "may have overdone it."
Mr. Kim says the film shows the rebels "not as terrorists but as people who wanted to defend their country." Yes, they "were fiction," he says, "but I tried to venerate them so the 10 days of revolt were as close to the facts as possible."
The truth was terrible enough to deserve an accurate retelling, says Chi, sounding like critics of Oliver Stone's "Platoon," about Vietnam.
"The people of Kwangju will be embarrassed by so much divergence," he says. Other Koreans "will think it's what happened, and the younger generation may have a wrong understanding of history."
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