DONG PUNGSIN

A market square fills with cries for independence in 1919. In the wave of Korean flags, Dong Pungsin watches her father fall to a soldier's bullet. She is taken before a Japanese colonial court, sentenced in a few cold formalities and locked inside Seodaemun Prison. The film never shows the cruelty head on. It builds the fear of what is coming out of darkness, narrow corridors, iron doors, the sound of keys and heavy boots. What breaks her in prison is not the violence. It is a lie carried in by a woman acting on someone's orders, that her mother has died. Her last hope gone, she refuses food and keeps up her resistance in the cell until she dies there. At the end her breath becomes soil and a grave with no name, and the grave runs on into the shape of the peninsula. The film speaks the name of Dong Pungsin, an independence patriot whose burial place has still not been found, and asks where we should send her home.