Director Park Chan-wook risked jail twenty-five years ago to direct a film about the friendship between North and South Korean soldiers, which won box office success, and launched his actors’ ascent to global fame.
Since then, the two Koreas have experienced a deterioration in relations, with Pyongyang rejecting its long-held goal of unification and last week destroying a place that had traditionally held reunions of families that had been tangled up for decades.
Park claimed that a quarter-century later, his hit “Joint Security Area” still resonates with audiences.
“It is a sad reality that this movie’s themes still resonate with the younger generation”, he told reporters in Seoul this month.
“I hope that by the 50th anniversary, we will be able to discuss it as just a story from the past”.
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The film is widely regarded as a masterpiece of South Korean cinema and its cast members have gone on to wider success, including “Squid Game” actor Lee Byung-hun and Song Kang-ho from Oscar-winning “Parasite”.
But when he set out to make it, Park — best known today for action thriller “Oldboy” and mystery romance “Decision to Leave” — was far from a prominent director. His first two feature films flopped.
Desperate for success, Park delved into one of the most sensitive topics: the decades-long division of the Korean peninsula.
At the time, Park feared that his tale of inter-Korean bonding could fall foul of laws banning the “glorification” of the communist-run North.
“We prepared ourselves” for the prospect of being jailed, he told reporters.
Smash hit
But history was on his side.
Three months before the film’s September 2000 release, then-South Korean president Kim Dae-jung held a historic summit with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang.
Against the backdrop of that reconciliation, “Joint Security Area” swept almost all domestic film awards that year. It won the Berlin Film Festival’s award for best picture, becoming South Korea’s highest-grossing film at the time.
Actor Lee, who is now one of South Korea’s biggest stars, said he watched the film 40 times to see how the audience felt.
Kim Jong Il, a well-known film enthusiast, was even rumored to have seen it, according to local media.
The film is set in the eponymous Joint Security Area, located inside the Demilitarized Zone, the 250-kilometre (155-mile) -long strip of land that divides the Korean peninsula.
It is the only location where North and South Korean soldiers can only face off in front of one another, making it one of the most densely fortified regions on earth.
The tragic movie explores secret friendships that develop when South Korean soldiers accidentally cross a landmine and form friendships with South Korean soldiers. They form bonds over South Korean pop music and chocolate desserts.
Breaking barriers
Nam Dong-chul, a film critic and chief programmer at the Busan International Film Festival, told AFP that “before “Joint Security Area,” depicting North Korean soldiers in South Korean cinema was somewhat taboo.
He claimed that “this movie broke that barrier by capturing real-world, relatable North Korean soldiers.”
“At the same time, it was a successful and well-crafted blockbuster, marking a significant advancement in the history of Korean cinema”.
Since then, South Korea has become a global cultural powerhouse.
Some credit “Joint Security Area” with laying the groundwork.
According to Jerry Kyoungboum Ko, head of film business for CJ ENM, the South Korean studio that distributed the movie, the movie “driving force behind the creation of films in the Korean cinema industry that combine the director’s artistic vision with commercial viability.”
Since then, there has been both tragedy and reconciliation at the real-world JSA.
Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, and Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, met there in 2018.
Kim and Donald Trump shook hands across the border the following year.
However, it also included a defection by one of North Korean soldiers in 2017 that saw them open fire.
And in 2023, troops were rearmed on both sides of the JSA, breaking a military pact that had been signed during more optimistic times.
Park said he frequently gets asked if the movie was shot at the Panmunjom, or JSA, when it is being shown abroad.
“I always say that this movie might not have been necessary if we had been able to film at the right time,” I’d always say.
Source: Channels TV
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