Najeun moksori

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 Rather than revealing a gruesome past through historical documents or seeking to shame the perpetrators, Byun’s film, the first part of a trilogy, gave the grandmothers an opportunity to show themselves as they are: not as a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)