Commentary given  at the October 25, 2015 screening at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema- part of the CSK’s Afterlives Symposium

This was a hard film to watch. Jiseul raises questions about the politics of filmmaking and how it intersects with history and brings it into confrontation with the now.

In some ways atrocities are more bearable when they are presented through some of the common prisms through which we often see history and historical events – statistics, dry factual reports or theoretical frameworks written out in academic jargon. the past becomes flattened, containable, wholly knowable and the sheer humanity or inhumanity of the moment is muted.

A few years ago I was in jejudo researching a film about the haenyo, the women divers who freedive for shell fish and other sea creatures. The haenyo are legendary because they can remain underwater for periods of time as long as two minutes, without the aid of any breathing apparatus. I went to a museum built to honour the women divers and there, amidst the glass boxes and artifacts was information about the role the haenyo played in resisting Japaense colonization. Jeju province was a site of fierce independence in the time of Japanese occupation and the women divers led protests which spread throughout the islands.

The government sponsored museum honoured the role of the women as freedom fighters. An officially sanctioned version of the past. The story of how the island continued to be a site for politically motivated military actions and atrocities during the Korean war was simply not there. That history has yet to be fully uncovered and understood which opens the question – in what ways is that history alive to this day in other degrees?

In that light, Jiseul is a very necessary piece of filmmaking and I believe the filmmaker really didn’t have a choice but to make this film. This is the kind of work that one is driven to do, not commissioned or employed to do. The director, O Muel is from Jejudo and every film he has made is related to his hometown, his community and its history. The choice here is deliberate – a collision of personal and political in a creative voice. He didn’t choose his story, the story chose him. He has a lifelong commitment to this subject matter, an engagement that will produce singular work.

There is much power in this voice. Through Jiseul, we begin to understand history through the lens of ordinary people, we participate in a kind cinematically engineered immersive time travel. This isn’t a history lesson, figures and stats don’t frame the story. In fact you’d learn very little factual date or formal historical context about the Jeju massacre from this film. This is an experiential journey into a moment of history. By choosing this narrative path, O Muel insists we bear witness – in all the unblinking, conflicted and discomforting ways a witness inhabits that space.

This is a challenging space to occupy. The funny, the gross, the horrific and the banal are all simultaneously present. History refuses to be contained and orderly because – as we all know from lived experience – crisis, actions and memorable moments never are.   When we bring forward the ordinary, peopled experience of large historic events, we are refusing to monumentalizes history– by focusing on ordinary villagers hiding in a cave who are massacred during a time of war, Jiseul confronts the treatment of history that suggests it is linear, fully understandable, that history is acted out by large, important people and that history is the stuff of epic Hollywood narratives. Jiseul is what happens when we turn our lens on the unknown people who lived the brunt of history.

People whose lives were changed forever. These are intimate legacies that are oftentimes lost to us. Think of the power of Anne Frank’s diaries. That short text written by a school girl to herself did more to inform people about the horror of the persecution of Jewish people during the holocaust than most published tracts.

Jiseul traces the political fault-lines of war to bear witness to the those who never had a chance to interrupt treaty talks, to have a seat at the table when borderlines were chalked up or to tell their story in propaganda news reports.

The film is also a reverse mirror into history. By redacting the monumental from history, by giving the film the title ‘potato, ’we are drawn to make connections between our ordinary lives and those of the murdered villagers. We can recognize ourselves in their portrayals;  it leads you to ask, what role are you playing out in the history of the now?

I feel like we are living in historical times. We trip over the currents of history on our way to school, work and home. But its not often that you can stop and point a finger to draw out the history of the now.   Some local examples – the first ever Asian Canadian woman is running for mayor in Toronto. That’s historical.   Many of us witnessed the violence and horror in Ottawa this week on our news screens. A hiistorical moment that suggest security measures and islamophobia are guaranteed to rise to historic levels. If we took the headline historic moments and unpacked how ordinary people, from multiple positions experienced and lived through them, what would we learn about the a contemporary moment of change? How would we better understand the kinds of political decisions that lead us to war and other atrocities?

So Jiseul is at once historical and contemporary. The political spirit of resistance remains in Jeju. Today a long standing protest movement has formed to fight back against the buildup of a U.S. naval base. U.S. military interests in the region remain dominant. This is not history. This is now. The naval base will serve as a key forward base for the military operation known as U.S. Pacific Pivot. Farmers, the women divers, students, interfaith communities, environemtnalits and artists have built a formidable coalition to resist the naval base – and they have been fighting for 7 years.   History threatens to be replayed on the same soil.

For me this is why a film like Jiseul resonates so much. It brings many questions to the forefront and challenges us to redefine the very idea of whose story needs to be told.

Min Sook Lee is an award winning Canadian filmmaker. Her work has been programmed by a wide range of international and Canadian broadcasters, including PBS, History UK, CBC, and Global. Lee’s Filmography includes the documentaries the Real Inglorious Bastards (2013 winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Best History Documentary) Tiger Spirit (2009 winner of the Gemini Award- Donald Brittain Award for best Social/Political Documentary Program), and El Contrato, for which Lee won the Cesar E. Chavez Black Eagle Award for the documentary’s impact on the rights of migrant workers. Lee’s achievements and contributions are recongized through and award named in her honour give at the Mayworks Festival, Canada’s oldest labour arts festival.