‘Time won’t heal everything’
Documentary sheds light on solidarity among bereaved families bearing lasting scars
“Is it true that time heals everything?” asked Yoo Gyung-geun, a bereaved father who lost his 18-yearold daughter Ye-eun in the Sewol ferry tragedy on April 16, 2014.
In response, Bae Eun-sim, the mother of student activist Lee Hanyeol, who died after being hit by a tear gas canister fired by riot police during Korea’s pro-democracy movement in 1987, replied, “No.”
After a brief pause, she added, “You just have to keep on living. Life goes on with the lasting scar.”
The conversation is an excerpt from “Life Goes On,” a documentary by Jang Min-kyung.
A winner of the Korean Film category at the 13th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival in 2021, the piece centers on bereaved parents who lost children in some of the nation’s notorious man-made disasters, depicting how they channel their loss, anger and frustration into solidarity and personal growth.
In the film, Yoo talks with Bae and Hwang Myung-ae, whose daughter was one of the 192 who lost their lives in the deadly Daegu subway fire of February 2003, and Koh Seok, a father who lost twin girls in a fire at the Sealand Youth Training Center that killed 23 in June 1999. The conversations were later made into a podcast series.
Jang, who was among a team of documentary filmmakers who have been archiving the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster in solidarity with the victims, taped the recording sessions and made them into a film, as she saw parallels between the social disasters and problems that bereaved families must deal with after their losses.
“These social disasters happened at different times and in different places, yet they shared a common thread: a tendency to recur one after another,” she said in a recent interview with The Korea Times.
“Also these problems and the suffering the bereaved families went through were not personal matters, but results of what happens when a society’s system fails to function. I thought that needs to be shared with the world.”
These families lost children to different tragedies but faced similar issues. They all had trouble recovering the bodies of their lost loved ones and finding out how and why they died. They have been severely criticized and accused of harboring “political motivations” for demanding a proper investigation, a request that has often been denied. Also, their efforts to build memorials faced fierce opposition from those concerned due to worries about potentially lowering housing prices in the surrounding area.
Years and decades have passed since their losses, but they say the painful memories still remain vivid and fresh. However, they learned to channel their anger and frustration to grow stronger and bigger hearts and stand in solidarity with other neglected and vulnerable people so as to remember the victims, as witnessed by Jang.
For example, Koh established the Korea Children Safety Foundation in 2000, the year after he lost his children. The institute now trains safety experts and runs safety education programs and campaigns for children.
Hwang and Yoo have done everything they can to fight for fact-finding probes and demand justice. Yet, they say they feel sorry that the bereaved families in social disasters that happened afterward also went through the same problems they faced.
That’s when Bae and the mothers of the victims of the government’s deadly suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising offered consolation to bereaved families of the Sewol ferry tragedy with words of solidarity, telling them, “We know what you have been through.”
“’Time does not heal everything, but continuing with life does,’ the bereaved families said,” according to Jang. “But living on doesn’t mean simply sitting and doing nothing. It means going out and meeting people, asking questions and demanding justice. That’s what they emphasized as the essence of moving forward in life.”