A South Korean film meets an eerie parallel
The history of sex workers isolated over disease takes on unexpected relevance.
DONGDUCHEON, South Korea — The story had been brewing in her for years — a tale of disease, isolation and a state’s control over women’s bodies during a troubling chapter in South Korea’s not-so-distant past.
Gina Kim’s virtual reality film will immerse viewers in the life of a “camp town” prostitute catering to U.S. troops in the country in the 1970s. The narrative will focus on a day her character spends locked in a government-run treatment center, being pumped with antibiotics for a suspected case of venereal disease.
Kim, a film professor at UCLA, hadn’t planned on shooting at a time when much of what her protagonist experienced — rudimentary contact tracing, stigmatization from infection, quarantine and government control over citizens’ health — would overlap with the day-to-day lives of millions around the globe.
But to tell the story in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kim would fly across the Pacific, undergo a 14-day quarantine and sheath herself in a biohazard suit.
The veteran director’s journey turned into an unexpected discovery of parallels between the current health crisis and the ordeal of women who half a century ago found themselves at the mercy of both the U.S. and South Korean governments, yet for whom neither wanted to take responsibility. In both cases, the body was subject to larger forces.
“It would have been almost unthinkable to restrict people’s bodies this way in modern society. ... But it became a universal experience,” she said. “The political is manifest in individuals’ bodies.”
A house of horror
Kim’s film is set in a now-overgrown and abandoned two-story building with barred windows once known among locals as the “Monkey House,” located in Dongducheon, a city about an hour north of Seoul where American soldiers have been stationed since the 1950s.
In the 1970s, the building with barbed-wire fences was one of several facilities where South Korean sex workers suspected of having sexually transmitted diseases were warehoused, often against their will, to be isolated and treated until they were cleared to return to brothels.
At the time, U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea had some of the highest rates of venereal diseases among American troops anywhere in the world. But the South Korean government, concerned the United States would scale back its presence on the Korean peninsula, was eager to see that their needs were met — including facilitating a robust sex industry that had sprung up around bases.
Part of that effort was an aggressive “cleanup” campaign to rid the women of sexually transmitted diseases. They were forced to wear numbered tags with health inspection records, and those suspected of being infected were treated with penicillin against their will, according to testimonies of women and government records. Women said they were rounded up and confined, and feared that high doses of penicillin would lead to allergic reactions, with the possibility of death by shock.
“It’s unbelievable the type of forced treatment and immense control they were subject to,” said Kim.
The director had come across the “Monkey House” during her first virtual reality film project, 2017’s “Blood-less,” set in the same city and based on a true story about a brutal 1992 murder of a South Korean prostitute at the hands of a U.S. soldier.
She said she couldn’t believe the walls that had been witness to such pain were still standing, even though they were crumbling, streaked with graffiti and damaged by amateur documentarians, shamans and thrill-seeking YouTubers.
Kim wanted to transport viewers into the women’s experience through virtual reality. After extensive historic research and reading testimonials from women who’d been confined there, she was gearing up to shoot the film — titled “Tearless” — in 2020.
Alone in quarantine
Watching anxiously from Los Angeles as the coronavirus numbers fluctuated in South Korea, Kim considered directing the film remotely from the U.S. by having a crew member strap an iPad to their chest so she could see what they were seeing as they moved through the building.
But South Korea, with a meticulous contact tracing regime and an early government response, was faring far better than the U.S. Film and TV productions began resuming within a couple of months after the outbreak. And increasingly, Kim felt she had to be in the building — and to sense its ghosts — to direct the film the way she wanted.
In August, she landed in South Korea, where she underwent a 14-day quarantine at an Airbnb. A smartphone app on her phone would immediately alert authorities if she ventured out.
A couple days into quarantine, marking the passage of time by changing slants of sunlight, she began to feel she was undergoing a somewhat analogous experience to what the isolated sex workers may have endured. Upon being identified as the source of an infection by an American soldier, at times falsely, South Korean women were confined for days or weeks at a time.
“I had no choice but to experience it in full for 14 days,” she recalled. “It helped me empathize emotionally ... even if it was 1/100th of what the women went through.”
She kept thinking back to how the health and fate of the women, many of whom were brought to the brothels by brokers as young girls from poor backgrounds, were an afterthought to the political considerations of decision makers.
“Political incompetence becomes a matter of life and death,” she said.
Capturing history
The surgical tools glinted as Kim arranged them in careful disarray.
She sat as a doctor would have at the foot of the examination bed with stirrups, transporting herself back to the 1970s. Once the scene was set, she and the rest of the 26-person crew would duck into the hallway to allow the 360-degree VR camera to capture the room.
Silence fell throughout the building. The camera rolled. Scattered throughout the two f loors were all manner of debris left behind by curious onlookers — a suitcase, a car bumper, a Yankees cap, multiple futons.
Producer Zoe Sua Cho said even in the months between the crew’s preproduction visit earlier in the summer and the day of shooting in mid-September, the deterioration of the structure was noticeable.
“The building ’s history and memory are disappearing,” she said. “There was an urgency to the story. The building itself is in danger.”
While there’s no telling what the world will look like by the time the film is ready for release next year, Kim said she was curious to see how the pandemic would color viewers’ reception of the movie.
“We’ve all experienced being locked away and isolated due to a virus,” she said. “We’ll never be able to go back.”