Yeom Hye-ran takes on another devastating Jeju story in 'My Name'
Yeom Hye-ran in a scene from the film "My Name" / Courtesy of Berlin International Film Festival
It's 1998 and Jeong-sun (Yeom Hye-ran) is driving down a narrow country road on Jeju Island. Dappled sunlight dances through the trees overhead as a light sea breeze blows in from the coast. Throw in a few tangerines or camellia blooms and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more picturesque vision of what Jeju has to offer.
But then the wind picks up, scattering leaves and petals in a swirl around the car. The sight of it sends Jeong-sun spiraling, triggering long-forgotten memories buried deep by her and others alike from 50 years prior.
"Unbowed" director Chung Ji-young hasn't forgotten, though. The socially minded auteur continues to shine a much-needed spotlight on the darker chapters of Korean history with scenes like this in his latest film, "My Name," which debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this month.
What starts out as the story of a teenage boy and his mother weaves in generational trauma inextricably bound to the island they both call home. Yeom is no stranger to this thanks to her Baeksang Award-winning turn in last year's "When Life Gives You Tangerines," in which she played a haenyeo (woman diver) struggling to provide for her family on Jeju opposite IU as Ae-sun.
Her characters in both stories might be fictional, but their suffering is not.
While Young-oak (Shin Woo-bin) contends with violence at his all-boys school, Jeong-sun turns inward at the behest of her physician. The usual meds aren't cutting it anymore, so this new doctor from Seoul tries to get to the heart of what might be causing Jeong-sun's panic attacks. Through meditative techniques, Yeom's character comes to realize that her heart is indeed the cause — or at least the heartache that comes with emotional wounds that have never been given a chance to heal.
As a child, Jeong-sun experienced the start of the Jeju Uprising firsthand, a real-life massacre in which an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people were killed on the island between 1947 and 1954. As depicted in the film via long-suppressed flashbacks, many of the victims dubbed communists by the authorities were in fact innocent people caught up in what remains one of the bloodiest government crackdowns on civilians in Korean history.
From left, Yeom Hye-ran, Chung Ji-young and Shin Woo-bin pose prior to the opening ceremony of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, in Berlin, Feb. 12. Chung's film "My Name," starring Yeom and Shin, was invited to the Berlinale's Forum section. EPA-Yonhap
Massacre Korea was told to forget
The Jeju April 3 Uprising, as it has since come to be known, decimated the island's population, yet local government forces pressured people to stay silent about what happened for decades after. Those who did speak up faced discrimination and even punishment according to the Special Investigation Committee of Anti-National Activities, which was quickly established by the Korean National Assembly in 1948 to investigate Koreans who had collaborated with Japan during colonial rule.
It's no wonder that a character like Jeong-sun would bury the memories of that awful day so deep. Not only did she experience unspeakable violence at a painfully young age, society itself actively encouraged her to forget.
Along with a dual timeline that shifts between her life in 1998 and 50 years prior, "My Name" also contends with these systemic measures in Young-oak's arc, where students like him question why the uprising is glossed over in textbooks. Their teacher pushes back, keen to move past the topic entirely, despite a growing awareness of this tragedy in his classroom and beyond that too in real life as well.
For decades, the Jeju Uprising was misrepresented or absent in school textbooks entirely. It's only as recently as 2024 that efforts have been made to fully integrate the historical facts as they actually transpired.
Full acknowledgement of the Jeju April 3 Uprising by official government bodies began in the 1990s after civil rule was reinstated. In 2003, then-President Roh Moo-hyun apologized to the population of Jeju for what transpired: "Due to wrongful decisions of the government, many innocent people of Jeju suffered many casualties and destruction of their homes."
Skeletons can only be buried for so long before they resurface and begin to shape the present, be it through individual trauma or collective outcry against something larger. Just as Jeong-sun comes to reckon with what happened to her on that fateful day, so too has Korean society at large.
Just last year, archives chronicling the Jeju April 3 Uprising were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, serving as a powerful example of how healing and reconciliation can begin once past traumas are fully recognized and confronted for what they were. This is vital work at a time when victims are still being identified now in 2026, with remains returned to their families 77 years after the uprising occurred.
A poster for "My Name" / Courtesy of Berlin International Film Festival
Films fighting to keep memory alive
Long before official recognition took place, filmmakers similar to Chung were doing their part to investigate the truth and honor the thousands of Jeju citizens who lost their lives or someone close to them that day.
A 1997 documentary by Cho Sung-bong named "Red-Hunt" was one of the first. Many more have followed since, including "Jeju Prayer / Binyeom" (2013) by Im Heung-soon and "Soup and Ideology" (2021) by Yang Yong-hi, just to name a few.
But fewer directors have revisited this tragedy through a fictional lens like the one used in "My Name."
A notable exception, of course, is "Jiseul," a black-and-white drama by Jeju-born director O Muel that won Sundance's World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in 2013. The film follows a group of villagers who hid in a cave for two months to hide from the military once the violence broke out. This humanist approach was echoed again in "Hallan," Ha Myung-mi's film from last year that followed a mother (Kim Hyang-gi) trying to protect her daughter after her husband joins the revolt.
Rather than focus on the political struggle at hand, humanist dramas such as these and "My Name" foreground the victims of the Jeju Uprising and those who survived to tell the story of what really happened.
When Jeong-sun finally remembers what happened to her as a child in "My Name," she does so in the same barley field where the atrocities occurred 50 years earlier. Camellia flowers are often used to symbolize Jeju and the story of its people — both during and after the uprising — but barley is more grounded, anchored by soil. And crucially, it's far more resilient, a crop known for thriving in places where others might die.
Like the barley, Jeong-sun is resilient too. She keeps pushing on, just like Ae-sun's mother Gwang-rye also did in "When Life Gives You Tangerines."
In both stories, the two Jeju-born women played by Yeom carry great strength in the face of trauma. Their pain reflects the struggle of an entire nation in turmoil, hurting but unable to express that hurt until decades later. But this strength is not just their own. It also belongs to the women who came before them, the real-life residents of Jeju whose suffering is just as heartbreaking as it is defiant.
Thanks to filmmakers like Chung and the countless others who fight for recognition — including activists, lawmakers, historians and more — Korean society is finally reckoning with this chapter in full, mourning but also learning from the tragedy that unfolded during the spring of 1948 in an otherwise picturesque, almost perfect setting.
David Opie is an entertainment journalist from the United Kingdom who writes across a range of publications including IndieWire, Empire, Radio Times and more. He also founded the LGBTQ+ newsletter Cruising Cinema. Find him at @DavidOpie on X.