documentaries - Korea focus

Award winners in the biannual David Plath Media Award, 2020 & 2022 as judged by a committee of the Society for East Asia Anthropology, https://seaa.americananthro.org

2022 David Plath Media Award – 206 Unearthed

dir. Chul-nyung Heo; applicant: Sona Jo, producer at SonaFilms

This stunning film blends documentary-style footage, interviews, and metavoice commentary to tell the searing tales of a voluntary group of amateur archaeologists, seeking the remains of civilian dead from the Korean War. The 206 of the title references the 206 bones of the human body, at best unearthed with painstaking care and pieced together to bring the past to a final reconciliation with the present. At worst, however, these are bones whose hauntings remain unearthed, unfound, and unresolved. The film astonishes with its elegance, ranging from the philosophical to the deeply personal to the scholarly. It brings to the fore contemporary anthropological discussions of memory, emotion, trauma, and healing, here rooted in a particular time, place, and group of people, but reaching far more broadly. In doing so, the film invokes the power of the medium itself to achieve its visual and auditory profundity.

2020 David Plath Media Award – Untold (기억의 전쟁)

Bora Lee-Kil (2018, documentary, color, 79 minutes)

Synopsis (adapted from the film's website):

Untold is a story about "warring memories" surrounding a civilian massacre during the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, South Korea fought in the Vietnam War as an ally of the United States. Korean soldiers conducted operations to root out communist insurgents, which led to the killing of large numbers of civilians. According to South Korea's official history, the Vietnam War enable Korea to achieve rapid economic growth. The Vietnamese survivors' experiences have gone largely unacknowledged and the massacre treated as if it never occurred. In central Vietnam, people continue to live with the memory of this brutal and horrifying event. Every February, villagers offer prayers and burn incense in various locations to console the victims in a ceremony called, "Dai Han (Korea) Commemoration."

From the jury:
Untold is a powerful documentary that intimately explores a lesser-known part of the Vietnam War: the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at the hands of South Korean soldiers. With its compelling storyline, the film skillfully conveys the deep emotional trauma of the 1968 massacre without allowing the tragedy to become a gratuitous object of the cinematic gaze. The film is visually rich and ethnographically oriented, paying particular attention to the texture of individual lives, detailed personal narratives, and the important role of ritual in remembrance practices. Untold deepens our understanding of the global Cold War, its legacy, and the interlinkages between East Asian, Southeast Asian, and American neocolonialism/imperialism from a distinctly inter-Asian perspective. It will be an important resource for instructors teaching about Asia, civil society, and the politics of memory.