The Murmuring

Young-joo Byun / Republic of Korea (South Korea) / 1995 / Czech Premiere / 93 min.

synopsis

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Each Wednesday noon, a group of women gather in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul to stand up for the rights of comfort women. They demand that the Japanese government issues a formal apology and pays damages to the Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves by the Japanese army during the WWII. After years of living in seclusion and humiliation, these women decided to share their stories with the director and speak about this previously undisclosed chapter of the history of Korea. The Murmuring is one of the first Korean documentary films widely distributed in cinemas and forms the first part of the director's documentary trilogy about Korean women forced into sexual slavery, with the second part called Habitual Sadness (1997) and the third and final part My Own Breathing (1999).

„When I was gathering my friends to work with, I had a chance to visit House of Sharing – which was located in Hapjeong back then. Halmonis at House of Sharing were hostile to me just because I was a documentary filmmaker. I, however, was rather fascinated by their deep wounds and the defensive wall they had built. That was how the film started, but what I didn’t know at all was that it would turn out to be an eight-year-long documentary trilogy.“

biography

Director Young-Joo Byun (1966) studied law at Ewha Women’s University and film at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. Her documentary films are focused on feminism and human rights. Since 2002, she has been involved in directing live-action films.