[HanCinema's Film Review] "1984, Choi Dong-won"

Baseball in eighties-era South Korea was a big mood. This was the time period where the country's economic development had really started to pay off, and baseball became a symbolic representation of that. Only developed countries like the United States and Japan had their own professional baseball teams, and the founding of the KBO in 1982 was a big deal. I discuss this context because regrettably, "1984, Choi Dong-won" makes the puzzling decision of simply assuming its viewers know a lot about South Korean baseball.

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Why director Jo Eun-sung made this assumption, I'm still not sure. He's about as old as I am, which is to say that everything that happens in "1984, Choi Dong-won" happened before he was even born, so this is all just history to him too. His only context for who Choi Dong-won is and what he did was the fact that he famously pitched a series of incredible games in the 1984 Korean Series.

Credit given where it's due- "1984, Choi Dong-won" features a lot of excellent media footage from that era which gives a good vantage of what South Korea looked like back then both on the baseball field and out of it. But a good documentary is more than just a collection of old news broadcasts. There has to be some sort of clear overriding point, or story, and the only story that "1984, Choi Dong-won" is telling is to just give summaries of how good Choi Dong-won's stats were in the 1984 Korean Series with anecdotes from friends and family about what a diligent player he was.

Sometimes these stories border on the sweet, like one where a fellow ball player notes that he only appreciated the damage he was doing to his arm because his wife told him what she saw him do in his sleep. Choi Dong-won, a bachelor, had no wife to make these observations, so it's not surprising that he retired relatively early for a ballplayer. Note that the documentary itself doesn't give any hard dates or background on Choi Dong-won's life before or after 1984, it just sort of implies that this stuff happened.

Even as a summary of the games themselves, "1984, Choi Dong-won" isn't very helpful. The series that year was between the Samsung Lions and the Lotte Giants. The Lions were doing so well that year that the Lotte Giants were the clear underdog. The Samsung Lions had actually thrown a couple of games right before the Korean Series to insure they'd play the weaker opponent, so South Korean baseball fans countrywide generally wanted the Lotte Giants to win.

Again, this is a sort of interesting anecdote, but there just isn't enough context overall for "1984, Choi Dong-won" to build much of a story out of it. The subject matter here is way too specific for its own good, to the point I wonder whether South Korean baseball fans will get any more out of it than I did. Any question even so simple as why Jo Eun-sung is interviewing Japanese people in his documentary about South Korean baseball is never even posed, let alone answered.

Written by William Schwartz