Najeun moksori

Fast 40 Jahre vergingen, bis sogenannte „Trostfrauen“ – zur Zwangsprostitution für japanische Soldaten aus Korea verschleppt – öffentlich von Japan Kompensation forderten. Die Regisseurin begleitet einige der nun alten und gebrechlichen Frauen ein Jahr lang zu ihren Protesten, lebt mit ihnen, schenkt ihnen, die aus Scham so lange schwiegen, Gehör. Geduldig und diskret bringt sie uns die traumatisierten, zugleich kämpferischen Koreanerinnen schmerzhaft nah, ihre erschütternden Erzählungen von ihrem Leiden in den Bordellen und nach ihrer Heimkehr. Aber auch ihren unerschütterlichen Willen, den Tag ihrer Rehabilitation noch zu erleben. (Barbara Kronsfoth)

Famously made with equipment borrowed from the legendary Japanese Ogawa Productions, a collective of self-styled ‘film nomads’ whose impact on the documentary was considerable, Byun Young-joo’s monumental NAJEUN MOKSORI also draws on the same intimate interaction with a subject over a period of several years for which the collective became famous. The subject here is a group of six elderly women who are survivors of forced sexual labour during the Second World War. They gather each week outside the Japanese Embassy, demanding a formal apology and compensation. Byun’s request to make a film about them was only granted after she spent more than a year with them in a communal home in Seoul without picking up a camera. The film offers a fresh perspective on a tragedy that had been ignored at home and abroad until Kim Hak-soon broke the silence with her famous testimony in 1991. Rather than revealing a gruesome past through historical documents or seeking to shame the perpetrators, Byun’s film, the first part of a trilogy, gave the grandmothers an opportunity to show themselves as they are: not as a homogenous group of sad victims of an evil foreign power, but as unique personalities that each have a different story. (Gerwin Tamsma) 

Byun Young-joo: HABITUAL SADNESS (1997), MY OWN BREATHING (1999), MILAE (2002), FLYING BOYS (2004), HELPLESS (2012)