Film festival aims to raise awareness of refugees
A scene from "Last Men in Aleppo"
By Ko Dong-hwan
The fourth annual non-competitive film festival founded to raise awareness of refugees in Korea was held on June 17.
The small-scale festival at Seoul Cinema in Jung-gu featured three back-to-back films each followed by guest speakers in group-visit (GV) sessions.
With its thematic catchphrase “Meet and Greet,” this year's festival first screened “Last Men in Aleppo,” a 2017 documentary about the Syrian civil war.
Directed by Firas Fayyad, the movie follows three founders of White Helmet ― an organization of ordinary citizens who rush to sites of military strikes and attacks in the hope of saving lives. The voluntary rescuers, torn between horrific scenes of reality and their own commitment, ask themselves whether to flee their country or stay and fight for it.
The movie won the World Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 90th Academy Awards in March this year.
Guest speakers were Abdul Wahab from Help Syria, a Korean civic aid group dedicated to war-torn Syria, and lawyer Lee Il from Advocate for Public Interest Law (APIL) who has remained close to about 1,200 Syrian refugees in Korea.
The refugee film festival began in 2015 when a network of Korean activists trying to raise awareness of refugees in Korea decided that usual methods like flash mobs and distributing leaflets at street booths were no longer effective.
After basing their campaign around World Refugee Day on June 20 since 2011, they turned to hosting a film festival. This year, 12 civic groups sponsored the festival. The groups include whistleblowers on migrant and immigrant issues, public law firms, human rights foundations and a community for migrant women.
The festival also featured a Korean film “The Breath,” a documentary, released for the first time at the festival, about Jumma people from Bangladesh who live in Gimpo, Gyeonggi, as refugees. Some of the refugees appeared as guest speakers.
The last film “Nice People” from 2015 is about 3,000 Somali refugees in a small town in Sweden who play bandy ― a winter sport similar to ice hockey ― with the aim of competing in an international championship. Ultimately, their efforts help overcome local Swedish prejudice against them. Representatives of Korean activist groups fighting for migrant women attended as guests.
Hosted by APIL and the refugee supporter network, the festival aims to publicize the fact that there are refugees in Korea and that Koreans must get along with them.
Although South Korea became the first country in East Asia to enact its own refugee law in 2012, the country has accepted only 2 percent of applicants for refugee status.