Director turns to virtual reality to tastefully show tragedy
SEOUL, Korea, Republic Of — For 25 years filmmaker Gina Kim wanted to make a movie about the true story of a South Korean sex worker killed by an American soldier, but struggled with how to do so without feeling she was exploiting the victim. Then virtual reality arrived.
Through a partnership of storytelling and technology, Kim finally brought the 1992 murder to life in Bloodless, a 12-minute piece that won the award for best VR story at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The director said virtual reality is providing new ways to depict tragedies without making them into a spectacle.
“It allows you to feel the pain of others as if your own,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “VR is not cinema. It’s something else.”
Kim was a college freshman in 1992 when South Korea exploded in rage at the incident involving the soldier and sex worker in the town of Dongducheon, home to a U.S. military base 40 km north of Seoul.
Protesters, including Kim, took to the streets, trying to shed light on the grim conditions of sex workers and to urge the South Korean and American governments to bring the soldier to justice.
Yet it was during those protests that Kim first saw how apparently well-intentioned people could exploit the very person they were trying to help. Protesters seeking to highlight the case had printed fliers and posters of a leaked crime scene photo showing the unclothed body of the 26-year-old woman brutally disfigured and damaged. The image led to an outpouring of anger that eventually led to the soldier’s hand over for trial in South Korea, where he was convicted of murder.
Yet Kim and others lamented how the reprinted image was a form of violence against the woman and her family.
“I felt extremely disturbed and awful about it,” Kim recalled.
It was that memory that stifled Kim’s efforts to bring the story to cinema for so many years.
“I worked on it and stopped trying to come up with a better way of telling the story with the right ethics of representation and it was extremely difficult,” Kim said. The “cinematic medium is such a voyeuristic medium and the viewers enjoy what unfolds on screen as a spectacle.”
Only after she was introduced to virtual reality, was she able to find a way to portray the death.
“What I really ultimately wanted for the viewers (was) to not necessarily experience the horror of being murdered or being sexually assaulted,” Kim said. “But just to be there, with her, with genuine sympathy and empathy. I thought that could be possible with this medium.”