Korea’s coming together the stuff of fiction
Films and television shows ‘too sympathetic’ to North after being produced when hopes of peace were high
SOUTH KOREA’S latest all-action movie blockbuster has topped the box office since its release in late December, but is coming under fire for portraying a North Korean soldier as the hero who saves his
Korean counterpart.
In the big-budget film, Ashfall, special forces from North and South team up to save their countries after Mount Baekdu erupts. Lee Byung-hun, who plays the North Korean officer, emerges as the hero and saves the peninsula from a volcano that is revered in the North as the mythical birthplace of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current North Korean dictator.
Ashfall is among films and TV shows commissioned in 2018 when hopes were high of peace on the peninsula. But a barrage of rocket tests from the North and a breakdown in relations between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump has left those dreams in tatters. North Korea is again the bad guy – except in the movies.
Accusations the productions are too pro-North Korean in flavour have also been levelled at the creators of Crash Landing on You, a romantic comedy TV series first aired in mid-December. The plot has the young heiress of a major South Korean fashion company blown over the Demilitarised Zone that divides the two nations while hang gliding, but landing in a picture-postcard village and being rescued by a dashing North Korean officer.
Song Young-chae, a professor at Seoul’s Samgmyung University and an activist with the Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, said, “depicting life in the North as normal and happy is very dangerous”.
“Movies, television shows, the media in general have a powerful ability to affect the thoughts of ordinary people and for them to portray life there as perfect is appalling,” he said. “People have to know what is really going on.”
Dan Pinkston, a professor of international relations at the Seoul campus of Troy University, said both productions would have been planned in 2018, when there was genuine optimism that detente was in the air on the peninsula.
“There was a huge outpouring of hope that things were going to change”, he said. “But those hopes and dreams were based on a fantasy. And we are seeing that now.”