Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea’s increasingly transnational motion picture output, especially following the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae-jung, a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Today it is not unusual to see a big-budget production about the pursuit of social justice or the protection of civil liberties contending for the top spot at the box office. With that cultural shift has come a diversification of film subjects, which range from undocumented workers’ rights to the sexual harassment experienced by women to high-school bullying to the struggles among people with disabilities to gain inclusion within a society that has transformed significantly since winning democratic freedoms three decades ago. Combining in-depth textual analyses of films such as Bleak Night, Okja, Planet of Snail, Repatriation, and Silenced with broader historical contextualization, Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of South Korean cinema’s role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across several identity-based categories.
A Note on the Text
Introduction: “I Am a Human Being”: The Question of Rights in South Korean Cinema
Part I Institutional Foundations and Formal Structures
1 The Rise of Rights-Advocacy Cinema in Postauthoritarian South Korea
2 If You Were Me: Transnational Crossings and South Korean Omnibus Films
Part II Movie Minors and Minor Cinemas
3 Hell Is Other High Schoolers: Bigots, Bullies, and Teenage “Villainy” in South Korean Cinema
4 Indie Filmmaking and Queer Advocacy: Converging Identities in Leesong Hee-il’s Films and Writings
Part III Disability Rights in Mainstream and Minoritarian Filmmaking
5 Always, Blind, and Silenced: Disability Discourses in Contemporary South Korean Cinema
6 Barrier-Free Cinema: Caring for People with Disabilities and Touching the Other in Planet of Snail
Part IV Representing Prisoners of the North and South
7 Beyond Torture Epistephilia: The Ethics of Encounter and Separation in Kim Dong-won’s Repatriation
8 Story as Freedom or Prison? Narrative Invention and Human Rights Interventions in Camp 14: Total Control Zone
Part V Migrant Worker Rights in Hybrid Documentaries
9 Between Scenery and Scenario: Landscape, Narrative, and Structured Absence in a Korean Migrant Workers Documentary
10 “Powers of the False” and “Real Fiction”: Migrant Workers in The City of Cranes and Other Mockumentaries
Part VI Nonhuman Rights in a Posthuman World
11 Animal Rights Advocacy, Holocaustal Imagery, and Interspecies Empathy in An Omnivorous Family’s Dilemma and Okja
Coda: “I Am (Not) a Human Being”: The Question of Robot Rights in South Korean Cinema
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
HYE SEUNG CHUNG is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and the author of Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance, Kim Ki-duk, and Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations (Rutgers University Press). She is the coauthor of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press).
DAVID SCOTT DIFFRIENT is a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and the author of M*A*S*H and Omnibus Films: Theorizing Transauthorial Cinema. He is the coauthor of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (Rutgers University Press).
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