The Voices of the Silenced

Directed by • Park Ma-eui (박마의) • Park Soo-nam (박수남)

148min | Release date in South Korea: 2024/11/13

A Korean-Japanese co-production.
Synopsis
Park Soo-nam, a second-generation Zainichi director, discovered that she was losing her sight just as she set out to digitally restore her 16 mm films with the assistance of her daughter, director Park Ma-eui. The footage, shot over fifty years, is indelibly marked with the blood, tears, and countless corpses of Zainichi Koreans. It isn’t just the voices of forced laborers, atomic bomb survivors, and "comfort women" that are resurrected from the deteriorating, 100,000-feet-long film reels—it is also the voice of Park Soo-nam, herself, fearlessly fighting alongside a Korean boy on death row, storming out during the first-day-of-school ceremony to protest the singing of the Japanese national anthem, singing "Garden Balsam" at a massacre site, and attempting to find a hopeful future from the 100-year history of Koreans in Japan. "The Voices of the Silenced" is an archive of Zainichi Koreans' resistance and struggle and a remarkable autobiography of a woman who knows no defeat. KANG Sowon

28th Busan International Film Festival

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