Independence, and a 100 percent cut in 2011

Almost every new Korean debut, the essay says, is made with a person’s own money, may appear briefly at a festival, and then vanish; the press has space for ten million admissions, not for a film that may draw a thousand. Independence is from capital, and from the ruling stories of commercial cinema, a line that runs back to university clubs in the 1980s social movements.

After a marked growth in 2009, the sour view of the term did not last, but in 2011 production support and direct grants were cut 100 percent from the Film Development Fund. Filmmakers protested in print and in front of the ministry; a debate with the Korean Film Council followed, yet policy, as placed here, still showed no sign of change.

Han Gong-ju from the victim’s side, and a 2014 answer

In the year it opened, Han Gong-ju took prizes at overseas festivals. Motivated by the Miryang group sexual assault, and unlike earlier films of the same event, it is told from the victim’s side. Gong-ju transfers to a Seoul school; people do not welcome her, a clinic shames her, and school and police look at her wrongly. Chun Woo-hee plays her as an ordinary girl who must be able to live, under Lee Su-jin’s careful direction.

In 2014, Im Yu-cheol’s Anyone Can Be Brilliant and Jin Mo-young’s My Love, Don’t Cross That River are placed as warm documentaries that found an audience by word of mouth. The essay reads Han Gong-ju beside 16 April and the instruction “stay still,” and beside the line after a 25-meter swim: a wall, even if you go. This page stays with the 2011 cut and with 16 April as placed here, and does not add later official box-office figures, support restorations, or later official findings. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Overseas critics and festival programmers often call Korea a surprising producer of new directors each year; once the path is known, surprise is harder. Almost every new debut is made with a person’s own investment and labor. A hard-won independent film may be introduced briefly at a festival and then disappear. Young directors’ films are sometimes lumped together as “festival films,” yet without festivals it is hard even to find an official chance to be shown. Forms of support have long declined into a nominal structure that keeps an institution standing. The press, giving space to a story of ten million admissions, has no space for a film that can only draw a thousand. To expect a new Korean cinema under those conditions, the essay says, is close to chance and miracle. An independent film does not follow the formula of a commercial film aimed at a general box office. It is made from a free sense of theme, not from sensational scenes or a conventional feeling and ending. “Independent” is placed in two senses: independence from capital, and independence from the ruling stories of commercial cinema. A commercial film is invested in, produced, and shown by a production company and a distributor. An independent film is made with a director’s own capital, with funds raised by an audience, or with non-commercial public money. When a production company invests, its views enter the film as well as the director’s; such a company usually prefers box-office content and avoids politically or socially critical subjects. An independent film can express its own theme without that intervention. The independent tendency is closely tied to the history of independent film itself. In Korea it took shape in close relation to the social movements of the 1980s. In the early 1980s, as film drew notice as part of those movements, many university film clubs were formed, and their members later created independent-film groups, so that work which had been part of a social movement naturally carried a political character. Independent films tell stories of political and social problems outside a political power structure, and they also express a director’s own world. Directors draw a variety of themes in their own manner, not by a box-office formula. A negative image of the term, which began in a refusal to recognize the concept at all, did not last long after independent film achieved marked growth in 2009. What followed instead, the essay says, was a replacement of those who had run the infrastructure, or a halt to support across independent film as a whole. In 2011, production support for independent films, and direct grants, were cut 100 percent from the Film Development Fund budget. To protest, filmmakers published a relay of newspaper contributions and held one-person demonstrations in front of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The ministry and the Korean Film Council held a large debate among filmmakers, but many criticisms of government policy continued there as well, and government-level support policy, as the essay places it, still showed no sign of change. In that setting the independent field was preparing a future by its own efforts to live on its own. The issue of support, the essay says, needs to be set out more fully, and the Seoul Independent Film Festival, which sums up a year’s independent films and offers a vision, cannot stand aside from the question. The film then watched is Han Gong-ju, which, in the year it opened, took the achievement of prizes at various overseas festivals, and treats an event familiar to its audience, yet forgotten for a time. The same event had already been filmed more than once. Before seeing it, the essay wonders at the poster line, “I didn’t do anything wrong”; after seeing it, the meaning of those few words is clear, and the shock of the material is great. Several main strands take their motive from the Miryang group sexual assault. What differs from earlier films is that Han Gong-ju tells the story thoroughly from the victim’s point of view. It is not an easy film to watch at ease. It gives substantial space to her transfer to a school in Seoul and her effort to adapt to a new life, and at the same time refers in flashback to what happened to her. Viewers already guess what that was. They begin by looking at her with pity, yet the reality shown on the screen is harshly cold. No one she newly meets is glad to welcome her. The shabby room she comes to stay in is itself oppressive; the gynecology clinic she visits for treatment shames her rather than considering her; smartphones and the internet, tools of a new generation’s communication, are things she scorns and must avoid; the social systems that should protect her, education and the police, look at her with a distorted gaze. The film draws an irony in which a victim is made to seem a perpetrator, and children who have lost a sense of betrayal and of ethics, and a family that could not protect her and has come apart. Its world is clearly fiction, yet it induces a strangely realistic fellow-feeling. A moral vocabulary has been used to build a social system, but that system has collapsed under unreason, and a double, cunning human gaze has become a common everyday scene. The film does not, however, simply keep listing wretched sights. It tries to keep the discomfort to a minimum and to consider the audience; in that sense the director’s work is called quite shrewd. The heroine, Han Gong-ju, is so ordinary that it is hard at first to believe she is a child who has lived through something terrible. That portrayal, the essay says, carries two meanings. One is a point not usually considered: the perpetrators of that outrageous event may be called beasts, but the victim is only an ordinary high-school girl. In other words, Gong-ju is someone who can recover from pain and live in the world like other ordinary girls, and who must do so, and whom we should care for — a message the film makes us realize we had unthinkingly overlooked. Lee Su-jin’s direction is called remarkably fine and thoughtful, and Chun Woo-hee’s work as Gong-ju is outstanding. A victim is often imagined only as someone to be pitied, or as a being filled only with pain; the film lights her, at least in daily life, as a person no different from others. Her gestures, including when she goes to her mother, and her speech in each scene, are those of a high-school girl, and they make a viewer feel that the gaze placed on her had been, without meaning to, a discriminating one. Chun, with the director, interprets the character freshly. Watching her try to live an extremely ordinary life is, the essay says, still more painful, both because she seems to be acting as if nothing were wrong, and because the terrible event that happened to such a child cannot be watched calmly. Even her flat way of speaking, unless she is brought directly against the past event, seems a symptom of a great shock. Inserting the event in flashbacks in between shows that even if she returns to daily life, it will not quickly be erased from her memory. The root of the praise, the essay says, is not only that. Lee places the emphasis not on anger and pain but on support and hope. Viewers share Gong-ju’s terrible memory, and beyond it they also meet a remaining possibility and a hope in the present. The story and the people around her are not treated as mere fantasy, which deepens fellow-feeling. The film, titled with the character’s name, conveys her inner life both objectively and keenly. Lee’s script and direction are placed at a high level, and Chun’s performance shows that she can carry not only a forceful role but also a character with a sensitive, complicated interior. Independent film, the essay says, has lately been changing in several ways. Material once thought of only as ideology-oriented shorts or a progressive film movement has become more various and more imaginative, an alternative to the tedium of existing commercial cinema. Independent films have moved beyond shorts of some twenty minutes, and features have appeared, and openings in ordinary theaters have increased, though not in the unconditional release and distribution form of commercial films: theaters are used mainly to reach devoted viewers with a strong interest, and as a temporary means to draw new general viewers. As in Han Gong-ju, the path from making to release is always hard. The surroundings of independent film have always been poor, and an audience far thinner than the interest given to mainstream films has made the work still harder for those who hope to make it. The film does not describe one by one, or explain as cause and effect, the wounds, memories, and painful present the event brought her; it chooses a fragmentary method, with careful mise-en-scène. Painful memory rises suddenly and interrupts her days, and society’s fragmentary interest and selfish attitude circle around her. As can be seen in the course of revisions to the film law, independent filmmakers have tried to reflect the lives of ordinary people, and so they also take as material the stories of people outside the mainstream: the reality of minorities at the social edge — queer people, workers, women — and the look of the young are thus represented on the screen. Cultural critic Lee Hyeok-jun said that a commercial film, because it thinks of profit, chooses material a majority will like, but that an independent film chooses something particular even in its subject. The message of independent film, the essay thinks, may be found in life itself: what we live for, where we should take comfort, whether these years are worth enduring. For Koreans living through a time full of that doubt and self-reproach, 2014 perhaps had that meaning. The names of several independent directors were then becoming known. Documentary independent films they had made were finding an audience in theaters by word of mouth, and sending a hope. Im Yu-cheol’s Anyone Can Be Brilliant and Jin Mo-young’s My Love, Don’t Cross That River are placed, before they are called hits, as barometers that let one guess at the inner world of Koreans in 2014. What differs from ordinary commercial film is that they hold a warm human story. In a society where hatred of other people seemed to grow by the day, a drama that finds the feeling or the tears that had been lost is therefore precious. The essay’s writer, as one member of that hard society, was glad and surprised at the achievement of such a documentary, and thinks what differs from existing commercial film is that it is a 2014 answer. One cause of the Sewol ferry disaster, the irresponsible adult instruction “stay still,” is set as touching Han Gong-ju through the common term “adult,” and through a defect or absence in the social system. The dictionary sense of “adult” is a person grown enough to take responsibility for their own work. The absence of such an adult is linked, for Gong-ju, to the line after she finishes a 25-meter pool, “Gong-ju, even if you go… it’s a wall, a wall,” and to the absence of a social system. The instruction “stay still” should have carried responsibility, but responsibility was not there; the system was defective and misfired, and it took the lives of many students and ordinary people who trusted and followed the instruction. How many adults can take responsibility, rather than only calling out “follow” and “keep”? For Gong-ju, the line “I might want to start again. My heart might change” is placed as a chance at healing and a thread of hope. Swimming was her way out of the pain, a last hold on life. There was no adult to take that thread, and the social system did not work as it should. 16 April cannot be begun again. If even one person had shouted to escape, if the rescue system had worked promptly… but a miracle did not happen; adults’ care for others was absent; the system’s defects and misfires took lives too precious, and arrived as anger. Families who lost beloved sons and daughters will take a long time to come out of pain and anger, and some may never come out. Even a little healing, the essay says, must begin from a precise account of the cause of the accident; if that too is missed, it will remain a great wound, a scar that will not be erased. The writer, being an adult, is sorry to the students who lost their lives or went missing, and sorry to Gong-ju. Healing and forgiveness, it says, are also a human share. This page stays with the 2011 cut, with those 2014 documentaries, and with 16 April as the essay places them, and does not add later official box-office figures, support restorations, or later official findings.

Last updated: 14 November 2026