Actress challenges wartime sex slave role
Actress Kim Sae-ron talks during a press conference for her upcoming film “Snowy Road” at CGV Wangsimni in Seoul, Monday / Yonhap
By Kim Jae-heun
Actress Kim Sae-ron said her upcoming movie “Snowy Road” is a historic story well-known to everyone and it helped her learn more about “comfort women,” or wartime sex slaves, while portraying her character Kang Young-ae.
Kang is a smart young student from a wealthy family who dreams of studying in Japan. She volunteers to join a student work group, which lures Kang with promises that she could study in Japan. She is kidnapped and taken to Japan where she soon faces the horrible reality of a comfort woman.
“First of all, I was careful about many things,” Kim said during a press conference at CGV Wangsimni in eastern Seoul, Monday. “I was worried if I could act well to express the event. But everyone has to know the comfort women story and someone had to do the acting, so I decided to participate.”
“The biggest difference before and after I participated in the movie is that I didn’t think about the comfort women issue that much before, but now I think about it more and I can’t ignore it,” Kim said.
The actress rose to stardom after she stared in “The Man From Nowhere” with popular actor Won Bin in 2010 when she was only 10 years old. Kim continued to appear frequently in both TV dramas and movies but it took her three years to appear in a leading role.
Kim said she had to travel a lot in the cold weather and many staffers helped her but it was still a tough shooting environment.
However, the actor said she could not whine about her situation when she thought about how cold and horrible it would have been for the original comfort women.
“Not many people think about this issue deeply. I also learned more through doing research and shooting the film. It is really difficult to express their pain and resentment. I hope many people experience what I had felt while acting Kang after watching the film,” Kim said.
“Snowy Road” will hit theaters on March 1, Korea’s Independence Movement Day.