Panmunjom is an previous village within the demilitarized zone, the two.5-mile-wide buffer that bisects the Korean peninsula, the place an armistice settlement was signed in 1953 and ended three years of struggle. Greater than 70 years on, Panmunjom stays frozen in time. Troops nonetheless guard reverse ends of the powder-blue buildings that straddle the North-South border, every marked T for Short-term.
Touring Panmunjom in 2023, filmmaker Tune Gained-geun began to query its largely defunct standing. It was then that he noticed the potential for a feature-length documentary that might monitor how negotiations for peace resulted in a state of limbo. Panmunjom: The Entrance Strains of Ideology is an emotionally spare, although not scholarly, close-up of the so-called truce web site, illustrated with a trove of archival footage dug up from the U.S. Nationwide Archives. However the engine behind the movie is the interviews with historians and eyewitnesses that element the complexity of the battle with out drawing on rote narratives about ideological variations.
Panmunjom fittingly premiered at DMZ Worldwide Documentary Movie Competition. Three weeks into its June 2024 theatrical launch in South Korea, Documentary met with Tune within the ground-floor cafe of Newstapa, an impartial investigative information outlet in Korea the place Tune works as a producer. On this interview, edited for size and readability, Tune discusses historic documentary filmmaking and storytelling with specificity.
The interview was carried out in Korean and translated into English by the author.
DOCUMENTARY: Was it difficult to seek out characters with first-hand accounts for one thing that occurred so way back?
SONG WON-GEUN: Thankfully, some folks from that period are nonetheless alive, and we may select our interview topics very deliberately. For instance, one of the intense negotiations that occurred in Panmunjom was over setting the navy demarcation line, which might be decided by the entrance line. So we wished to talk to somebody who had fought that particular battle. Yoo Jae-sik from the Korean Battle Veterans Affiliation gladly agreed to talk with us, for the reason that Korean Battle is beginning to recede within the public’s reminiscence. It made me emotional to listen to him discuss how he needed to kill simply to outlive and use piled-up corpses as barricades towards bullets. He was fully unaware {that a} cease-fire was in dialogue.
D: You additionally converse with individuals who can present the tensions that got here after, like Kim Shin-jo, the North Korean spy who was dispatched to assassinate the South Korean president and captured alive.
SWG: I’m of a era that was proven anti-communist academic movies about him in elementary college. After I managed to seek out Kim Shin-jo and requested him to introduce himself, he rattled off a biography that he’s introduced repeatedly for the previous fifty years—from his birthplace and household to his schooling and conscription historical past—virtually like a rapper. He’s a pastor now, however he’s made the rounds at numerous navy items to testify as kind of a pawn in years of psychological warfare. It actually gave me the chills. Our interview was attended by somebody, probably from the navy authorities or the Nationwide Intelligence Service, who I used to be informed accompanies him for each media-related request.
D: Did you’re feeling the necessity to confirm their recollections with archival data?
SWG: Sure. However it’s not just like the movies have been taken with cell telephones. An excellent variety of them have been staged by the U.S. navy, or so it appeared to me at the very least. I discovered a number of takes of the identical group of troopers working in several instructions in the identical place and cannons firing on cue. There didn’t appear to be a lot genuine footage from an precise lively battlefield. And I’m not right here making an attempt to make scripted TV. It’s actually the characters who converse from expertise that deliver the footage to life, so in a means, the testimonies come first, and the archival footage helps and visualizes the testimonies.
D: The way in which the pictures have been framed struck me as very cinematic.
SWG: As a result of they shot it like a film!
D: What was the archival footage used for when it was created?
SWG: On the time, it was utilized in U.S. Military productions. One instance is The Large Image (1951–1964), which drew big numbers of viewers and was meant to clarify to America what precisely it’s that the U.S. navy does all over the world. After the Korean Battle, the US did present help and supplies to construct colleges and hospitals and orphanages, and so they may get pictures of American troopers surrounded by grateful-looking kids. It’s good publicity. The resounding message is that America is right here to assist, not for violent occupation.
D: Most of your archival footage is from the U.S. How did you’re feeling concerning the lack of homegrown data concerning the Korean Battle?
SWG: It didn’t really feel unusual to me {that a} poor nation couldn’t afford to movie. Even now, if you wish to discover data on Korean democracy actions from the Seventies, you need to go to Japan. However data on the Korean Battle are persevering with to be excavated to today. I’d like to take a look at the archives of nations in Europe that participated within the Korean Battle from the Communist facet, like Hungary.
D: The Korean Battle is usually often called the “forgotten struggle.” For the primary half of the movie, you zero in on an much more obscure concern, concerning the prisoners of struggle.
SWG: The central sticking level in Panmunjom was over the repatriation of POWs. The U.S. wished to let the POWs select the place they might find yourself, however the Communist forces wished to observe the Geneva Conference and return them to their homelands. The 2 sides couldn’t attain an settlement, and talks dragged on for over 20 months. And the POWs weren’t simply sitting in jail cells. They fought extensively with each other throughout the camps. That is one thing most individuals know little or no about, and I wished to take this chance to tell.
D: You’re nonetheless trying to premiere the movie internationally. Do you ever fear that this stage of element might be troublesome to understand for an viewers unfamiliar with Korean historical past?
SWG: Under no circumstances. There’s been a deluge of content material concerning the Second World Battle. I received the impression these movies handled the identical occasions, with totally different administrators who deliver their worldviews. One doc sequence I watched about ideological wars introduced every little thing as an American story, and I discovered it woefully inadequate. In any case, the Korean Battle occurred in Korea, so I wished to discover Panmunjom as a truce web site that hasn’t modified a lot for 70 years, with out essentially taking sides or seeing it by the lens of one other highly effective nation.
We did should undergo one other spherical of modifying to mirror the developments since final October, just like the scrapped 2018 navy pact. We additionally needed to pare down among the specialists to make it appear much less tutorial and increase on the first-person witnesses. We have been on the fence about together with the final scene of former President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un in Panmunjom, as a result of it might be interpreted in a political means, however finally left it in for the reason that president has an obligation to work in the direction of reunification, in accordance with the structure. It’s simply not the case with the present administration.
D: The most recent growth in inter-Korean hostilities was North Korea’s launch of excrement-carrying balloons. Would that sort of factor assist stoke the curiosity of worldwide audiences?
SWG: It’d, for North Korea watchers, however apparently for others listening to about it for the primary time, it may set off a way of revulsion. Our advertising and marketing crew mentioned that any sort of psychological affiliation between Panmunjom and the balloons isn’t any good. However Panmunjom continues to be a prime vacation spot amongst worldwide vacationers, who’re granted a lot simpler entry than Korean residents. So in the event that they’ve already been there or wish to go, I feel the film may reshape their understanding of Panmunjom as one thing greater than a vacationer attraction.
Soobin Kim is a contract journalist and producer. She at present lives in Seoul.