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Documentary about repatriation of North Korean spies
More than 60 North Korean spies returned to their homeland in September 2000. They had spent nearly 30 years in a South Korean prison because they refused to disavow their political beliefs. A local documentary looks at their lives and their long and difficult journey home, not only from a political perspective but also from a humanitarian point of view.
The Local documentary "Songhwan (Repatriation)," which will open on March 19, revolves around two North Korean spies, Cho Chang-son and Kim Suk-hyung, two men who had no place to go. The director met them because he was asked to take them to his village.
"I had both curiosity and fear when I first met them. I didn’t think that I would make a movie for the public when I started to film them," Kim Dong-won said. "But I became interested in their stories, and later the more I knew about them, the more I wanted to help them go back to the North."
When he saw Cho taking care of his kids like a grandfather, he grew closer to him and a desire to film the individual lives of North Korean spies who tried to acclimate themselves to life in South Korea while struggling to return to North Korea after serving nearly 30-year sentences without converting their Communist ideology.
Since 1992, when friendly relations began to solidify between Kim and the two North Korean spies and other long-term Communist prisoners, Kim recorded their process of repatriation and all the troubles and conflicts it brought.
The noted documentary filmmaker had no idea he would spend almost 12 years and 500 hours of video tape making the documentary or that his diligence and fortitude would pay off last year in the form of the Freedom of Expression Award for "Songhwan" at the Sundance Film Festival, one of the biggest independent film festivals in the United States.
Kim has made documentaries dealing with social issues, including gentrification, a modern-day trend in which a city’s redevelopment pushes out lower-income residents such as "Sangye-dong Olympics" in 1988 and "Standing on the Edge of Death" in 1990. He has also documented the pro-democracy movement and the schism between North and South Koreas.
"The reason why I sent my work to film festivals was that I thought winning an award from a film festival would help me play my movie in a local theater," the director said.
Kim layers his story of the prisoners by approaching it from a myriad of angles. He highlights the peninsula’s contemporary history, weaving it with the personal histories of the former prisoners, and gets up close and personal through interviews with them, drawing empathy from his audience by depicting their hard life after release.
The documentary unravels the prisoners’ arduous trials by spending time with South Korean supporters who struggled for their repatriation and illustrating serious conflicts inside South Korean society.
The camera sometimes observes their lives at a short distance and also listens to them. But, combined with Kim’s direct narration throughout the nonfiction film’s two and-a-half hours, the documentary also explains how the director came to understand them.
The narrator is awestruck by the prisoners’ endurance through the dehumanizing, systematic torture that lasted throughout their 30 years in prison and is shocked by their too strong beliefs when they sing a song of praise about the former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung at a picnic in South Korea. But, after 12 years of relations with them, Kim concluded that they are just ordinary men who tried to maintain their integrity by holding onto their beliefs.
When they were finally repatriated to the North, the director started worrying about them and began to miss them even though they were revered as heroes who attempted to defend the North.
After his efforts to visit them in Pyongyang, North Korea, fell short, he asked a visitor there to film them for him. When he was handed his tape, he was touched by Cho’s comment. Cho said in the tape that he thinks of the director as a son.
The documentary will be released locally on March 19. It will be the first film distributed by the Art Cinema Network, an organization of local art film theaters.
(Korea Times, March 8)
