A man with no tie to the city, and a map of other works

The notes begin from a viewing of A Taxi Driver, and from the thought that Korea’s modern history packed industrialisation and democracy into a short span — a hard blow taken all at once, in their figure of speech. In that compressed story they place the Gwangju uprising of May 1980 as an event of unusual force: a state, they write, fully controlled one region, treated citizens as the main enemy, and sent in the army. Works on Gwangju, they say, divide into those that show the fear of citizens at the time and those that show the wounds afterward.

A Taxi Driver is told, in this account, from the side of a person who had no ordinary tie to Gwangju or to politics and is suddenly caught up in the events, and so becomes, almost against his will, a historical figure. They also name the novel 빼앗긴 오월 and the film 화려한 휴가 for peaceable daily life broken by confusion, fear and anger; the drama The Fifth Republic and the film Namyeong-dong 1985 for the political path to the uprising; the novel whose established English is Human Acts and a novel they title “You are twenty, or rather just nineteen” for the grief and anger of those who lived; Peppermint Candy for the confusion of a policeman among the suppressing forces; and the children’s story they call a run in May, which they judge too young in its audience to show the uprising itself.

A stream outside the city, and a long-distance call

What struck the writer in the film was how thoroughly the government had isolated Gwangju. Foreigners, and even outsiders, could hardly enter. The isolation is clearest, they write, when Kim Sa-bok escapes. He leaves in fear, as if the whole world might have ended, and at once children are playing in a stream and people are farming in peace; long-distance calls that would not go through inside the city now work, and people nearby do not know what has happened next door.

Children of Kim Sa-bok, and a line between fact and fiction

After a large success, they write, a person linked to the Chun Doo-hwan government said he would not hesitate to sue if the film differed from fact; internet users answered that the cruelty had not been fully conveyed. Then the actual children of Kim Sa-bok appeared, authenticated as his, and said the film had distorted their father. The publicity had stressed a personal story based on fact, and the writer felt disappointed once the children came forward. In the film Kim Sa-bok seems to have given a false name and telephone number on purpose; the children say it was his real name, that he had wanted to meet the German journalist, and that the journalist failed to find him later not because he hid but because he died the following year.

The notes argue that the film leaned on the journalist’s testimony and the historical situation, and investigated Kim Sa-bok himself too little. A film that takes a historical event as its material, they conclude, should keep fact and fiction apart, and should look carefully at the living person it uses. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of A Taxi Driver and other works on May 1980 in Gwangju, with the dispute over Kim Sa-bok left as the notes record it.

Last updated: 15 November 2026