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[HanCinema's Film Review] "Red Tomb"

Before and during the Korean War, the South Korean government made a point of murdering people, often in large numbers, on the suspicion of their being Communists. Disturbingly, the elderly interviewees in "Red Tomb" have taken this as such a matter-of-fact detail of life that they barely even flinch when director Gu Jahywan or anyone else asks them where the bodies are buried. This is the face of successful government-sponsored mass-murder- No Regret, no anger, this was just a thing that happened.

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The banality of evil described in "Red Tomb" is both its greatest strength as well as its most bizarre downfall. "Red Tomb" barely even really qualifies as a film- the sound quality isn't that good, nor does the cinematography do all that much to capture the southeastern Korean countryside except to the extent that we see how rural it is. This is documentary film-making on a very basic level- the material isn't exciting and that fact becomes especially disturbing once we actually start to see the mass graves.

Until the skeletons showed up, I had difficulty caring too much about the movie, even though the skeletons are literally just the physical evidence of the stories the old people were already telling. The creepy part is that the elderly interviewees seem to embody the exact same level of indifference. After a certain point they just had to let this part of the past go. It's not like there were propaganda campaigns- until fairly recently the South Korean government didn't even acknowledge that any of this stuff even happened.

By "fairly recently", I mean 2004, which is when most of the latter footage in "Red Tomb" is shot. We start out with 2013 interviews, then eventually head back to 2004 unearthings. Don't bother trying to look any of this stuff up on the Internet- these massacres are so completely faded from collective memory that English language media felt little need to report on them. Or English-language readers felt little reason to care. Hard to blame them, since it was claimed during the Korean War that the South Korean government that did all of these horrible things was a bastion of freedom and democracy.

But don't expect any politicizing from "Red Tomb". Director Gu Jahywan is quite consistent in only managing to take down the most basic facts. There's no justificatory point of view because what possible justificatory view could there be? Alas, we live in a media age where controversy and excitement are necessary to push a documentary, and without these elements, there's not much left for "Red Tomb" to serve as except a curiousity.

It's a fact I'm frankly ashamed to admit. In spite of the obvious importance "Red Tomb" has by bringing these issues to light in an indisputable context, it doesn't really bring these issues to life. If you want to watch "Red Tomb", you don't watch it to be entertained- you watch it to learn about an undiscussed portion of South Korean history that's remained buried for good reason. Skeletons can't talk to us about politics, even if that's why they were killed.

Review by William Schwartz

"Red Tomb" is directed by Gu Jahywan

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