New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. ix, 301 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos.) US$38.00, paper. ISBN 9781978809642.
Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient—authors who are among the leaders in the field of Korean film studies—begin Movie Minorities by accounting for their encounter with the Chinese Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee at the 2019 ACT Human Rights Film Festival held in Fort Collins, Colorado, where Lee’s documentary Letter from Masanjia (2018) was screened. Their conversation with Lee, according to the authors, “unexpectedly took [them] to the subject of South Korean filmmaking” (2), as the director expressed admiration for South Korean films such as The Attorney (2013), A Taxi Driver (2017) and 1987: When the Day Comes (2017)—all high-profile mainstream films that openly expose and critique the atrocities committed by the past governments. Their encounter with Lee and his praise of the artistic and political freedom the South Korean filmmakers enjoy led the authors to “rethink the meaning of rights-based cinematic advocacy … in the context of twenty-first-century South Korean cultural production” (3). They set forth to examine some of the socio-political factors behind the rise of rights-based advocacy in recent years and explain how South Korean cinema “has played an important role in solidifying social movements” (4).
Such a personal and personable opening of the book not only unwraps the subject of human rights advocacy and cinema in an engaging way, but it also points to the transnational and cross-cultural perspective the authors adopt, as well as reminding us of the book’s subtitle: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema. For instance, Lee’s film, which explores the brutal conditions inside a Chinese labour camp, features animated sequences to depict the details of the torture suffered by prisoners. This imagery is recalled in chapter 8, when the authors offer an analysis of Camp 14: Total Control Zone (2012), a German-South Korean co-produced documentary that details the life of a former North Korean prisoner named Shin Dong-hyuk, who escaped and eventually defected to South Korea; this film also features hand-drawn images and animated sequences which “serve as a form of visual witness” (172) to “human rights violations in secluded or shadowy corners of the world” (173).
As explained in the introduction, all 12 chapters (including the coda) are paired thematically into six parts. So, after outlining the origins and institutional foundations of human rights cinema in post-authoritarian South Korea—in particular, the formation of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) during the government of Kim Dae-jung (a long-time political dissident and former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses) and Seoul Human Rights Film Festival (SHRFF)—the authors move on in the second chapter to their main case study, If You Were Me (2003), a multidirector omnibus film produced by the NHRCK, delving not just into its production background, critical reception, and the narrative operations of its six different stories (or gazes) dealing with various types of discrimination and human rights violations, but also offering a critical reflection on the omnibus film as an “appropriate, if also problematic” (39) format for exploring human rights issues.
Following that, paired as “movie minors” and “minor cinemas,” chapter 3 examines the school-setting “bullying” films (e.g., Bleak Night, 2010 and Night Flight, 2014) that expose “the consequences of an abusive disciplinary system, class discrimination, gender oppression, and the decades-long exclusion of nonconforming identities in educational settings” (66), while chapter 4 focuses on the films of Leesong Hee-il, one of South Korea’s few openly gay filmmakers, who puts members of LGBTQ communities in the spotlight through his independently produced films. Chapters 5 and 6 centre on disability rights, first analyzing mainstream genre films that tend to infantilize people with disabilities despite creating public awareness, and then addressing the remarkable independent documentary Planet of Snail (2011), a transnational production (with participants from Japan, Finland, the US, Lebanon, as well as South Korea) that garnered international attention for its sensitive approach to the community of deafblind people. For me, the authors’ attention to the ways in which the film incorporates its deafblind protagonist Yong-chan’s space-travel-themed poems (that are highly self-reflective on his disability) was a revelation in the sense that it enhanced my “phenomenological understanding of disability rights as a physically felt subject” (9).
Two documentaries that are concerned with the daily struggles of former long-term political prisoners—Repatriation (Kim Dong-won, 2004) and the aforementioned Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Wiese)—are the main case studies for chapters 7 and 8. In these chapters, I find the authors’ admiration for the filmmakers’ dedicated and ethical approach to their subjects quite infectious; I was often nodding along with the authors’ detailed and perceptive analyses of the films. The authors then focus on migrant workers’ rights in chapters 9 and 10, analyzing the “alternative” aesthetics deployed to reflect the shared experiences of migrant workers in South Korea in the 2013 film Scenery by the Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu and a mockumentary called City of Cranes (2010), respectively. Chapter 11 highlights animal rights, focusing on films that problematize speciesism (privileging humans over nonhumans) and their use of iconography that evokes the horrors of the Holocaust. The authors wrap up the book by drawing attention to other nonhuman rights—those of robots (or artificial intelligence)—thereby pointing to the necessary ethical reflection on the concept of personhood that has already been highlighted in many South Korean cultural products.
After I finished reading, I had a small wish list for the authors (that includes further clarifications of certain concepts or stance), but all in all there is so much to admire about Movie Minorities. The book covers a remarkable range of films and offers eminently engaging and impressively erudite discussions and analyses. Above all, however, with its commitment to social justice, it makes a groundbreaking contribution to multiple fields beyond Korean film studies.
Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield