'Jiseul' hits 100,000 audience mark
This is a scene from the movie “Jiseul.” / Korea Times file
By Baek Byung-yeul
an art-house film based on the Jeju uprising of 1948, has reached the 100,000 audience mark, a surprising record for an independent movie.
Local theaters sold 103,000 tickets to the black-and-white film as of Friday, 22 days after it opened in Seoul, box office data from the Korean Film Council showed.
Jiseul, directed by Jeju-born filmmaker O Meul, has received critical acclaim, winning the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where it was lauded, particularly for its cinematography.
It premiered at the Busan International Film Festival last October, where it won four awards, including the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema Award.
Despite its scale of human catastrophe and the scars it left on local communities, the Jeju massacre is a largely forgotten event in Korean contemporary history. On April 3, 1948, an armed guerilla uprising was suppressed by the police and military, months before the country’s first democratic republic was established in August of that year.
Up to 30,000 people were killed in fighting between various factions on the island or due to executions, many of them innocent civilians accused of being Communist sympathizers.